Amanda McMillen, “Scattered Abroad, Held Fast”
In our passage from Genesis 12 for today, we have the genesis of the covenant made between the Lord and Abraham, the covenant that leads to the beginning of the Abrahamic line, the creation of the people of Israel through Abraham and Sarah’s long-awaited prayed-for child Isaac. It’s the covenant by which the Lord will make of Abraham “a great nation” full of blessing. And it involves Abraham leaving his country, his family, his father’s house, to a mysterious land that the Lord will show him - and the Lord will make of him a great nation, and he will bless him, and in Abraham, all the families of the earth will be blessed.
But to look at Genesis 12 and the significance of what it is that the Lord is promising for Abraham, we must look at the context in which we find ourselves at this point in the human story. So to look at Genesis 12, we must start our story at Genesis 11 - the Tower of Babel. In chapter 11, just before this passage, in the aftermath of the flood and Noah’s family story, people migrated from the east and came upon a plain in Mesopotamia, a people with one language, and said to one another, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth”. And in response, the Lord came down, confused their language so they couldn’t communicate with one another, and scattered them across the face of the earth so that their pursuits were thwarted.
If you’ve ever been to la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona then you might have a pretty good image of this kind of massive tower building. The famous cathedral was first designed by Antoni Gaudi in the 1880’s and has been under construction ever since. Gaudi’s death in 1926 means that he only saw one bell tower completed in his lifetime, after nearly 50 years of construction at that point, and since then construction has continued through civil wars and world wars, with a brief hiatus of 6 months during the height of the global pandemic in 2020.
Well the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 was its own kind of endless tower building - it’s a story of the human pursuit of greatness, of building a tower to reach the heavens and be more like gods than like humans, and God’s response is to crush their plans of greatness and scatter them abroad so they can’t work together in such prideful pursuit of self-proclaimed greatness.
My son’s first full sentence was one that he yelled as loud as he could - “I DO it!” he screamed with such force - he yells this at any occasion he gets, when I’m doing pretty much anything for him that he can’t do at this point by himself, like drive our car or play with the knives in the knife drawer. That tower of Babel human desire for independence and autonomy is baked in us right from the start.
Well immediately after this story in chapter 11, we get Genesis 12 - God tells Abraham, “Go from your country to the land I will show you - and I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great.” And Abraham’s response after he does what God commands is to build an altar to the Lord in thanksgiving for this promise - not a tower to showcase man’s prowess, but an altar, that gives thanks for God’s power, God’s deliverance instead.
These stories are next to each other on purpose - they show us the ways of man versus the ways of God. The way of man is to gather together for the sake of power, for the pursuit of pride, to make a name for themselves, as it says, to be like God in claiming a self-imposed, self-important, identity - and it might seem like a reasonable enough pursuit, people coming together for the sake of human innovation, to make a great name together.
Well, in his recent book Against Identity, philosopher Alexander Douglas discusses how the human pursuit of identity leads to both spiritual and physical violence. Douglas explains that “The desire to be God is the hope for… ‘metaphysical autonomy’: the ability to choose what to be and then make yourself into that. The elemental human passion is for the ego to ‘be its own foundation’...so, to say that God is ‘cause of himself’ is to say that he is able to create what he is. But when we try to create ourselves, the job is never finished.” (158-59) Sounds a bit like that Tower of Babel - a tower to the heavens, a tower of self-creation, making a name for ourselves - a tower with ourselves as the foundation, is one that can never be complete. This, by the way, is what Douglas considers the impetus for war in our world, and of all physical violence - a need to assert one person’s, or one nation’s, identity over and against another’s.
But by contrast to the Tower of Babel, in Genesis 12, Abraham is told to leave his homeland, his father’s house, everyone he knows and loves, to go to some random other place that he doesn’t know - which seems hardly fair for his family. He’s moving in the opposite direction as the tower of Babel - from Mesopotamia to a new land, from togetherness in one language and familial ties to a strange land and a strange people. And God says it is in this wilderness, in this isolation, where I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. The subject here is not Abraham, not man, in the human pursuit of being our own foundation, of making a name for ourselves - the subject is the Lord who scatters Abraham abroad - and yet somehow, in such chaos he promises to bless him - the Lord will make his name great.
When God says to Abraham to go from his country and I will make your name great - it is supposed to sound unbelievable, absurd even compared to the practicality of the tower of Babel - a people who want to work together to get on God’s level of productivity and human innovation to make a name for themselves. They want to take the reins into their own hands. And by contrast, Abraham is told to leave everyone he knows, to go to an unknown location, where God will make his name great. And how is that possible? He is leaving his very family name behind him, God is taking away every thread of Abraham’s power and influence and identity, and saying - your only choice now is to trust me. And with your trust, I will bless you, and make your name great, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
The tower of Babel is the kingdom of man and man’s own efforts - and the covenant of Abraham is the kingdom that only God gives, when you have nothing of your own to offer. “Greatness” and productivity as a kind of end goal can easily become an endless pursuit. The truth is that the people constructing the tower of Babel would have been constructing forever if God had not scattered them abroad - building a tower to reach the heavens would never have been completed. It’s a ladder with no end. When we believe the lie that productivity for productivity’s sake is fruitful, that self-betterment for self-betterment’s sake is going to get us finally up to God’s level of goodness, that self-worth is something we can build for ourselves brick by brick, taking the reins into our own hands, then we will spend our entire lives trying to reach a level of godliness that is simply not ours to possess.
So God mercifully scatters the people of Babel so that they may stop finally building something that isn’t theirs to build - so that they might rest in the fact that God is God and they are not.That their self-worth comes from God alone, the true foundation of their identity, not from anything they do. And God sends Abraham to the wilderness, to an unknown future, scattered abroad for the exact same purpose.
If you feel scattered right now, like the people of Babel, like Abraham and his family, pushed or pulled in different directions with no good sense of what the future holds, this story tells us that God is actually close at hand. If you feel like you’ve been trying to take hold of the reins in some area of your life, and the reins keep slipping away, well God’s got a tight grip on the things that you and I can’t seem to hold. Our powerlessness is where God meets us. And the best thing we can do when we feel scattered, when we feel out of control, is to make like Abraham and build an altar, because it’s here, at the altar, where we remember that we are in need of God’s provision, and direction, and blessing, through the body and blood of his son.
This is what God means, that through Abraham all the families of the earth shall be blessed. From Abraham and Sarah comes Isaac, their miracle child, who by Rebekah births Jacob and Esau, and from Jacob, Rachel and Leah come 12 sons, the 12 tribes of Israel, and then from Judah, down to Ruth, to King David, all the way to Joseph and Mary, finally, comes the child that blesses all the families of the earth.
As you may have seen earlier this week, the final piece of the tallest bell tower at la Sagrada Familia was put in place. An endless construction has finally come to a satisfying end. But what we see at the top of this tallest tower is different from what we might expect from the tower of Babel - it’s not a statue of a man, clothed in majestic godliness, proclaiming the kingdom of human potential and ability and greatness - the final piece to be laid in place at the endless tower of la Sagrada Familia was the cross - the tower dedicated to our Lord, with our faith’s symbol of death: the most extreme opposite of self-betterment and productivity and the human desire for control.
This is our salvation - not self-worth based in human achievement, not greater power and control, but a person, Jesus, the foundation of our identity, who, though we may feel scattered and confused in the murkiness of the strange land of our lives, does not leave us in despair, but comes to us at our altar in body and blood, and gives us his own great name - which is “child of God” - blessing all the families of the earth.
Amen.
