Rev. Victoria Millar
Covenant
Presbyterian Church,
Sermon “So You Will Be a Blessing”
Genesis 12:1-5
12Now
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.
2I
will make of you a great nation,
and
I will bless you, and make your name great,
so
you will be a blessing.
3I
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.’*
4 So
Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and
Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from
5Abram
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
and
they set forth to go to the
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
My favorite Dr. Seuss story is his book called The Sneetches.[1]
A sneetch is a Seuss invention, which looks mostly like a yellow duck
except it walks upright,
has arms instead of wings,
and has a potbelly.
This is a distinctly unglamorous creature.
But that didn’t keep the Sneetches
from finding a mark by which to claim
some of them were more valuable than others.
This is how the book begins:
“Now
the Star-Belly Sneetches
Had bellies with stars.
The Plain-Belly Sneetches
Had none upon thars.”
Those
stars weren’t so big.
They
were really so small
You
might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all.[2]
The book’s illustration shows a Sneetch displaying a green, star-shaped birthmark on its belly
striding confidently along a beach
bypassing a star-less Sneetch who is slumped in despair.
So a star means high status and no star means no status in the Sneetch universe.
Seuss continues:
“But because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches
Would brag, “We’re the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches.”
With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they’d snort
“We’ll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!”
And whenever they met some, when they were out walking,
They’d hike right on past them without even talking.”
And the exclusion is endless.
“When the Star-Belly Sneetches had frankfurter roasts
Or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts
They’d never invited the Plain-Belly Sneetches
They left them out cold, in the dark of the beaches.
They kept them away. Never
let them come near.
And that’s how they treated them year after year.”[3]
Seuss is, of course, poking fun at what I would call tribalism,
that tendency to divide the world into those like us, our tribe, vs. everyone else.
And I have sometimes found tribalism just as absurd as Seuss did.
A few years ago, I got roped into a meeting
with
a woman who worked as a sales rep for a well-tended cemetery in
the kind with many private mausoleums and marble angels.
It turns out her new marketing plan was to meet with pastors
whom she assumed could influence plot-buying decisions. (Bad assumption.)
The meeting got worse when she explained
she was pleased to have bought her own plot
at her employer’s historic cemetery
because prominent
I including the Sears
and the Montgomery Ward families were buried there.
I couldn’t believe she was name-dropping about bones in a cemetery.
It was then that my brain sounded an alarm saying:
She’s implying some bones are better than others.
She’s implying this is our last opportunity to be Star-Bellied Sneetches!
And I still wonder: Can it be that tribalism dogs us literally to the grave?
-----------
Today’s text in Genesis also speaks about tribalism.
This is the first appearance of Abram who will later be renamed Abraham.
All we know about Abram up to this point is that he has a wife named Sarai who was barren.[4]
And today’s text says Abram is 75 years old.
Without any detail about his earlier years,
it is as if Genesis is saying, let us begin with Abram’s defining moment
which happened when he was 75.
Today’s text says:
“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.”
This marks the beginning,
the first stirring,
the first outreach from God to one person named Abram,
which will ultimately grow to become a relationship between God
and Abraham’s descendents
who
will be called the chosen people,
This is the beginning of the choosing, actually on both sides.
God is the initiator.
And God chooses to give direction and promises to Abram.
And Abram chooses to follow God’s leading and to trust God’s promises.
God says to Abram, ‘Go--
into the unknown, away from all your relationships (from the top down),
from your country, your kindred
and your father’s house,
to the land that I will show you.”
The destination is not given, is not clear.
To go is to trust, step by step.
He is called (literally) to a journey (literally and figuratively) of faith.
Yet God makes a startling promise.
To Abram, God says: “I will make of you a great nation.”
Now this would be miracle enough,
the promise of descendents to an infertile couple long past child-bearing.
This is an enormous promise—not just the longed-for child
but a lineage that would thrive and become a great nation.
But then God says what to my ears are among the most magnificent and significant words in the Old Testament.
God says:
“I will bless you and make your
name great
so
that you will be a blessing…
and
in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
-----
The world is always full of tribes looking out for their own.
And I think we’re good at creating more of them.
I think we each belong to several.
Families, definitely, are tribes.
Americans are a tribe.
Midwesterners, Californians and East Coasters are subtribes.
Some college alumni organizations seem to be tribes.
Democrats and Republicans seem to be tribes.
God could have said, “Abram, I’m seeking someone who is responsive
and you’re in on the ground floor.
So I have a special offer.
Go where I send you, serve me, belong to me,
and I’ll make of you a great tribe
and bless your tribe above all others.”
And this would make God a tribal god.
A tribal god would be passionately partisan to Abram and his descendents
and savage to others.[5]
Which is how God sometimes appears in the later Biblical books
in
the stories about
For example, in the book of Joshua, God brings down the walls of the city
of
And
young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys.”[6]
But I do not trust that the conquest stories in the Bible show God’s heart.
Perhaps
the stories exaggerated the violence to claim
Perhaps
because this is how surrounding nations saw their gods.
But I do trust
today’s text in which God is concerned with more than
God
promised to bless
and
in
I trust this because, for us, Jesus is the window into the mystery of God.
And Jesus shows us the opposite of a tribal god, the opposite of partisan.
Jesus is one who blessed and loved people equally.
And Jesus is the ultimate gift and blessing from Abram’s line.
----------
The Maasai people
of
It reads like this:
“We believe in
the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything
good in it.
[God]
created man and wanted man to be happy in the world.
God
loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth.
We
have known this High God in the darkness, and now we know him in the light.
God
promised in the book of his word, the Bible,
that
he would save the world and all nations and tribes.
We believe that God
made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ,
a
man in the flesh,
a
Jew by tribe,
born
poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good,
curing
people by the power of God, teaching about God and man,
showing
that the meaning of religion is love.
He
was rejected by his people,
tortured
and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died.
He
was buried in the grave,
but
the hyenas did not touch him,
and
on the third day,
he
rose from that grave.
He
ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.
We believe that all
our sins are forgiven through him.
All
who have faith in him must be sorry for their sins,
be
baptized in the Holy Spirit of God,
live
the rules of love, and share the bread together in love,
to
announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again.
We
are waiting for him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.”[7]
-------
Back to the Seuss and his Sneetches.
An entrepreneur comes into town and sets up a machine with lots of ductwork and conveyor belts
For $3 each, he ushers Plain Belly Sneetches into the contraption,
and when they pop out, they have stars on!
Of course, the original Star Bellies are aghast.
But it turns out the machine is reversible.
For $10 each, the Star Bellies have their stars off.
And a great frenzy begins, stars on and stars off,
as the Sneetches keep paying their money
and popping through the machine,
arguing over which is best, star or plain,
and eventually unable to remember
who was originally with stars or without.
Seuss writes:
“Then
when every last cent
Of their money was
spent,
The entrepreneur
packed up and he went.
And he laughed as
he drove in his car up the beach.
“They never will
learn. No.
You can’t teach a Sneetch.””
And Seuss ends with this.
“But he was quite
wrong, I’m quite happy to say.
That the Sneetches
got really quite smart on that day,
The day they
decided that Sneetches are Sneetches
And no kind of
Sneetch is the best on the beaches.
That day, all the
Sneetches forgot about stars
And whether they
had one, or not, upon thars.”
-----------
Some of you are graduating soon and are starting a new chapter.
And I believe you are like a teachable Sneetch.
Yes, tribalism and the impulse to exclude others lives in our hearts.
But God resides there too and God is strong.
And God created you so that you would be a blessing.
And I am willing to give to you the words spoken to Abram and say:
“Go…and [remember you were blessed] so that you would be a blessing.
There are a million ways to be a blessing in the world.
· Include others, especially the ones who would otherwise be outsiders.
· Give of yourself.
· Make the world more beautiful.
· Help someone who is bearing a burden.
· Go on a safari to do good every day, even in your home town.
And I urge you to remember every day
that you and everyone with whom you share this good,
is a child of God,
the tribe above all others.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The three from whom all blessings flow. Amen and amen.