Jeremy Duncan: Like, we work hard to get somewhere new. Sometimes we work hard to become the person who's ready to go somewhere new. The point of your life is not the progress you are making against the markers that someone else has set for you. The point is to be faithful when divine opportunity becomes clear to you. Last week, we also closed off our first series of the fall, and it was called grounded.
And it was a series wherein we started the new season by reminding ourselves of our core commitments together. So we talked about what it means to be intellectually honest, spiritually passionate, to keep Jesus at the center, and then how those values call us to become peacemakers in our lives. Invite us to get up and participate in the world we want to be part of, how they root us in an experience of spirit, trusting that our faith is lived encounter, not just ideology. As I said last week, these are ideas that we return to regularly at Commons. So that's not a one and done.
You have heard all of that before, and spoiler, you're gonna hear it all again. That's part of why we come back to these rhythms. Today though, we are gonna shift into our second series of the fall. And this one is gonna take us right through to the beginning of Advent. As we begin a new cycle now over the next few years of returning to the stories of the patriarchs and the matriarchs of the Hebrew scriptures.
This year, we'll begin with Sarah and Abraham. But first, let's pray. God of all new beginnings, we pause in this moment, grateful for the stories that have brought us here today, for the faces we know and the ones that we are still learning to love, for the grace that gathers us again around this mystery of faith. You are the one who calls us forward, sometimes through wilderness with courage, sometimes through stillness with patience, but always toward new life. And so today, as we open our hearts to your invitation again, in that, may our questions slowly become prayers and are small steps part of your big dreams?
For those who are being baptized this weekend, may your spirit rest on them with joy and courage. And for those of us who are perhaps still waiting for what is next, may your quiet presence sustain and hold us today. Would you lead us once again always forever into the story that you are telling? In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Here we go. Big promises, small steps. This is the story of Sarah and Abraham. And today, we're gonna cover when the moon hits your eye, stuck in the middle with you, the land beneath your feet, and everything we have to leave behind. But before that, each year, one of our goals at Commons is to make sure we have a balanced diet of scripture.
And that means we have three, what we call anchor series every year. One directly from the words of Jesus this year. That will be the parables of grace in the spring. One that dives into a New Testament letter. We'll look at Ephesians in the New Year.
And one that grounds us in an Old Testament narrative like the series we begin today. And beginning today, we're actually gonna set the course for those Old Testament narratives over the next few years as we work our way through the patriarchs and the matriarchs of the Hebrew story. And to start, we're gonna go back to the beginning of that era with Abraham and Sarah. But I wanna situate that for you a little bit. One of the things that we talk a lot about at Commons is reading the Bible through Jesus.
That means Christ is the lens through which we interpret. We make sense of the whole long story. But one of the reasons we read the Bible that way is actually rooted in the promises made to Abraham. See, it's actually here to Abraham that God says all peoples, the entire world will eventually be blessed by the story that starts here. And I think this is one of the key things to understand about the narrative trajectory of the Bible.
God intends to, in the words of the apostle Paul, reconcile all things to God's self. But that reconciliation extends even to the healing of our imaginations. And so that story, almost like a mustard seed that would grow into something large, begins quite small. Quite small with Abraham and Sarah, old and childless, called by God, and then offered wild promises about their future through which they are blessed with a family that grows into a tribe that becomes an oppressed people who are then liberated to evolve into a nation that is called to welcome the foreigner in turn. And that slow expanding unfolding trajectory of welcome culminates ultimately in Jesus who invites all to the table of God.
That's what we mean by big promises. The reconciliation of all things begins here. However, like a lot of things in scripture and life, the steps to get there are often painfully slow and disturbingly unsteady. And so oftentimes, it's only in looking back through the work of Christ that we actually see how all of those small steps brought us all the way home. So this is Abraham, the first of the patriarchs.
Before the 10 commandments, before the nation of Israel, before any systems or structures or rituals or sacrifices, before anything actually that we would really understand as a Hebrew religion. There is just Abram and Sarai in the land of Ur. And so this is what we read at the end of Genesis 11. Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot, son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram. Now Abram and Sarai, they will eventually change their names to Abraham and Sarah.
So those are our characters here. And this group sets out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. However, when they came to Iran, they decided to settle there. Now Terah lived two hundred and five years. Well done.
Good for him. But he died there in Haran. Now next verse is the start of the next chapter. It is the big transition in the story of Genesis, and it reads, then the Lord said to Abram, go from your country, your people, and from your father's household to the land that I will show you. And here's our big promise, for I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you.
I will make your name great, and you will become a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, curse those who curse you. All peoples on earth, everyone will eventually be blessed through you. Now, lots going on here. For example, in the span of five short verses, we have met Abraham and found out he will save the world.
So let's settle in and see what we can dig out of this story. And to do that, let's go back to the start. This opening line, Terah took his son Abram. And we will get to the name changes a little later in the series, but just for clarity today, I'm gonna refer to Abraham and Sarah. But actually, I think our first question here should be, well, who exactly is Terah?
Well, truth is we don't actually get any narrative details about him. But we do find that he is part of a genealogy that is said to go back to Noah, he of that big famous boat. And what's important there is that Abraham is really an important transitional figure in the story of Genesis. His father, Terah, is part of what we call the primeval history of Genesis. Those are the first 11 chapters of the story.
It's where we get two different accounts of creation. We get Noah and a worldwide flood. We get Babel and towers that are going to stretch to the heavens and challenge God's authority. These are all very much stories, myths even, written to help us understand something about humanity's relationship to the divine. And we know this because all of these stories were told in slightly different ways across all kinds of different cultures.
And that means that part of what's important about the versions we have preserved for us in our Bible is actually about how they challenge or reshape how they're intended to correct ancient misconceptions of God, and then point humanity in better healthier directions. But here in fact, even this name Terah might suggest that Abraham is being called not just out of Ur, but out of some of those ancient misconceptions of the divine. You see the name Terah seems to be connected with the Hebrew word for the lunar month, And Sarai is connected with the Akkadian name for the Sumerian consort of the moon god. And if Ur is indeed a reference to the Sumerian city of Ur in Lower Mesopotamia, which was a real city, then we know from archaeological excavations that there was a thriving moon worship scene there as far back as the third century or third millennia BCE. What this means is that the story of Abraham probably emerges from an ancient moon cult.
And here's what I want you to pay attention to here. The story that will lead to the reconciliation of all things begins with the surprising intuition of a father who dies thinking the moon directs his steps. Remember, it was Terah that first took the family out of Ur intending to head toward Canaan where Abraham would eventually be called to go. And sure, he stops off in Haran, unpacks along the road, and never really gets going again. By the way, that word Haran originally literally meant main road in Azerian.
And honestly, you and I, how many times have we stopped along the road short of our goal and just settled for, I mean, what was available? Although, gonna give Terah credit here. Over time, that word Haran came to refer to an area about 20 miles from where we think Ur might have been. And eventually, Haran became the center of an Amorite population at one point a few centuries later. So Terah may have actually accidentally founded an ancient city in his lack of ambition.
May we all be so complacent? The point is, this is before the Bible, before there are any priests, before there was Israel, before there were any rules or religion or even sacred texts to follow. And here is God speaking to moon worshiping travelers, making wild promises about the future, nudging them to wonder if there might be more to the world than they've been told to expect. I mean, we think even for a second that the God of the universe is somehow bound to wait for us, for Christians to get involved before showing up in someone's life, I think we will find ourselves perpetually far behind the story of God. In fact, in my experience, professionally or otherwise, every single time I have thought, even for a second, that I have found myself blessed to be part of offering, even just a nudge toward God, what I found inevitably in talking with that person is that in retrospect, when they look back, they can see all the ways that God had always been there all along gently inviting them home.
That's not a bug. That's a feature. That's grace. And sometimes we often only ever notice it looking back. There's lots to mind in this story.
So we're gonna give it six weeks. But if we could come out of the story of Abraham, even just with that, trusting that God is present in more ways, in more lives, in more moments than we can possibly even begin to imagine right now, I think we might find ourselves beginning to catch glimpses of the divine perhaps in the ways we always wished we would have. Sometimes we just have to be open to see it. But that is perhaps easier said than done. Because we are sitting right now at what Walter Brueggemann calls perhaps the most important structural break in the Old Testament, certainly in Genesis.
It distinguishes between the history of humankind and the history of Israel, between the story of fall and the history of blessing. If you think about it, here's Abraham. He's dragged his wife Sarah along on this moon advised journey. He's now stuck in some podunk town that doesn't even exist yet. His nephew Lot is taking along and needs his new responsibility all because his father has just died and left them stranded along the road.
Like, this is where he's supposed to turn to the camera and say, yep. That's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up here. And that line, it's a cliche precisely because, I mean, we've all been there. Right?
No. Maybe not because you made some terrible decision or because you messed up anything in particular. Maybe just simply because you found yourself in a place you didn't expect to be, wondering about what might come next. Almost twenty two years ago. Sounds like a long time.
Almost twenty two years ago, I moved to Calgary, and I came out here to take a job as a pastor. Now, that decision was one of the best of my life. I landed in a city that I absolutely love, in a province where I have adopted both of my kids. I spent a decade at a church that brought me here learning, evolving, and being given incredible opportunities far above my pay grade. I then got to play a part in starting commons just over eleven years ago.
I now get to play a part in starting commons all over again in Marta Loop for a new decade. So I'm very grateful for all of it. But in the two years or so before I moved to Calgary, found myself somewhere like Haran. I had gotten involved in church in high school last couple years, graduated and then went straight to a Bible college. Was hired right away at a church in Toronto.
Everything was turning up Jeremy at that point. But I found out pretty quickly that it was not quite what I had expected. Long hair or not, Timu Jesus was not the gig I thought it was gonna be. That's not to say it was bad. In fact, I don't have anything bad to say about that first community I worked in.
But I will say I did know pretty quickly this just I mean, it wasn't gonna be for me. And so I quit, and I left. And I found myself in my mid twenties, married with a mortgage and a bible college degree, working part time at Best Buy trying to pick up enough shifts to make it all work. And I did, for which I'm very grateful. I ended up starting a little business, and I focused on that for about a year of my life.
But this was very much an in between space for me. I'd stepped out of one story, left er as it were, and yet I hadn't quite figured out where I was going yet. I'm still stuck on the road toward what was next. Now the irony, of course, is that I would eventually find myself back in a church just like Abraham found himself landing in Canaan where his father had always intended. But I think there are times when I have looked back and thought about those years, that in between space as just a page flip between two chapters.
Abraham maybe felt that way about Haran. There was his life in Ur where he grew up. There's one verse in Haran than his whole story in Canaan. I get it. Maybe you have a period like that in your life as well.
But the truth is, if I'm honest with myself, that chapter there, more important than I give it credit for. Because this chapter here, the one that I love in Calgary at Commons, it doesn't happen without what felt like a big pause button back there. If I'm honest with myself, there's no way I become the pastor I am today or even think about God the way that I do today without having stepped out of the church to see the world with what would become more seasoned eyes eventually. And so this week, as I'm reading this story and I'm thinking about this gap between the last verse of chapter 11, my dad has died. I'm stuck in Haran.
In the first verse of chapter 12, the Lord God of heaven and earth has called me to go somewhere new and change the world. I keep wondering about Abraham sitting with Sarah in Haran, sad about his dad, asking how he ended up here and what might possibly be next. But was that a week? A month? Did he wait a year or two like I did?
Maybe a decade? More? I don't know. I mean, honestly, his dad lived at 205. It's not like he didn't have time on his side.
But how long did Abraham do his best with just what was in front of him, waiting to hear about what would be next? Two things are important here. First, these kinds of pauses in our lives are not the kind of moments we're ever gonna write our stories about. That's fine. That's fine.
Not every moment of your life can be exhilarating. We probably don't want that either. But that shouldn't lead us to believe that nothing is happening just because the surface of our life is still. Sometimes moments of pause, rest, these are where some of the most important things are happening for us. Maybe things are shifting in us, how we think or how we perceive ourselves.
Our imaginations are being primed for possibilities we couldn't comprehend without a period of rest. And so if you find yourself in that space in between waiting for what's next, maybe even a little frustrated that you haven't figured it out yet, Understand you can do that passively, sit and wait until you hear the voice of God. And who knows? Maybe you will. God is gracious like that.
But I also believe you can wait for what's next very actively. Maybe you know a season is coming to an end, and you don't know what's on the horizon yet. Now is the time to dig in and do the work, to think about your goals, to reflect on your motivations, to figure out what you're scared of So that when opportunities present themselves, you can be ready to leap headlong into the unknown. But you do that work absolutely convinced that though the ground is hard, there are seeds of what's next below the surface making their way toward the light, and you're convinced you're going to be ready whenever they break through the crust. Like, sometimes we work hard to get somewhere new.
Sometimes we work hard to become the person who's ready to go somewhere new. And oftentimes, I think what's hard is that the people around us don't see that kind of work because it's below the surface. I think chapter 12 verse one is what reminds us that God does see all of it. The point of your life is not the progress you are making against the markers that someone else has set for you. The point is to be faithful when divine opportunity becomes clear to you.
And I don't know what work Abraham had to do there in Haran. Maybe it was facing the grief over the death of his father that prepared him to hear God in a way he had never heard before. I mean, maybe he just had to focus on making sure there were enough crops for those that he loved to get through the season in front of him well fed. Maybe he needed time to learn to let go of what his father thought he was going to build in Haran so that he could build something new in Canaan. I don't know, but I know this.
Going forward meant leaving a lot behind. Last week, I joked about my daughter giving me good news, bad news in the car on the way to not kindergarten. Daddy, I love you, she says from the back seat. I love you too. I reply, I mean I'm gonna cry when you leave, she explains.
And last week, I said that Jesus was not doing the good news, bad news thing. That does not mean that I think God is above such strategies. Because I find this call in chapter 12 fascinating. I'm gonna put it back up on the screen here for a second. The Lord said to Abram, go from your country, your people, and your father's household to the land I will show you.
For obvious reasons, I think the land I will show you is the part that we like. I mean, that's the cause we all wanna hear in our lives. What I got kinda fixated on this week was the first half of the verse though. From your country, from your people, from your father's household. In English, we've kind of cleaned up this verse for pacing, but there's this little Hebrew word min.
It's actually a prefixed supposition, and it is stuck on the front of every noun in this sentence. You cannot get away from from when you read this verse in Hebrew. Think about that. We're starting the story of the greatest call in human history, the beginning of the story that will lead to the reconciliation of all things, the movement towards salvation itself, and it starts with everything Abraham has to leave behind. One of the problems in our culture, I think, is our addiction to the perpetual yes.
This idea that we can have it all and then a little bit more. When the truth is almost every good thing you aspire toward will require you to decide what you're gonna leave behind. This spring, Rachel and I will have been married for twenty five years. Sounds like a long time. Lots of ups, few downs, twenty five years of building life together.
I got to experience that because when I said yes to my wife, I said no to every other possible relationship that could have taken me in other directions. Now were there other options available to me? No. Probably not. Let's be honest here.
Rachel was always the one coming down to my level. Thank you, sweetheart. I love you for that. But you get the idea. Every great thing you get to experience comes because you chose it over and against some other path in your life.
Now sometimes that choice is conscious. Sometimes it's deliberate. Sometimes it's forced on you. Sometimes you stumble your way through a series of missteps only to look back and see how fortunate you really were. But the fact remains, trying something new, going somewhere unexplored, stepping into everything that is in front of you right now, all of that will require some kind of choice about what you will leave behind.
And one of the ways that I think about this in my life is trying to whittle down the influence of the phrase just in case. So I'm gonna hold on to this thing just in case, or I'm gonna keep my options open just in case. I think sometimes it's really easy for me to just encase myself into staying put in Iran and never finding out where the road ahead me leads. And I'm not talking about being reckless. I'm not talking about betting the farm on every Bitcoin adventure that somehow squeezes its way through your spam filter.
I'm talking about finding the kind of courage to hear the voice of God, maybe even only once in a lifetime when it comes along and says, it's time to leave what's familiar, to go past what's been comfortable, to set out from your father's household because there is something spectacular for you on the horizon. And maybe today, you are still in Haran, and you're still waiting for what's next. That's okay. There is holy work for you to do in the soil under your feet right now. Every season of your life is sacred.
But maybe, like Abraham, you know that God is already speaking about who you will become next. And the first small step in that very big promise is to turn your attention from everything that was toward what could be so that you can set out on your next great adventure. Because that is faith, but it's more than that, it's life. The process of continually growing, evolving, becoming something new as God calls us back home. Let's pray.
God, we are grateful even if we need to remind ourselves for every season of our lives. Our childhood in Er, as we grow up and we become who we are, we figure out who we are as human beings. Those transitions and pauses in Haran where we're figuring it out and we're just doing our best with what's in front of us. And then those moments where we are called to go somewhere new, into the unknown, toward what could be if we just found the courage to step out. God, for whatever stage that we are in, we pray that your spirit would be near to us, reminding us of that we are loved and we are held, that you are patient and kind, and yet at the same time that you are always one step ahead of us, calling us into what comes next.
God, when the moment is right, we pray that we would muster the courage, not just to believe in ourselves, but to trust your path. And to know that with every step of grace and peace, every time we move forward in love, we are on that path all the way back to you. May you speak to us, comfort us, console us, challenge us all in the due seasons of our life. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.