Bread from heaven

photograph (c) Katherine Brown

Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not.” … When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.”

Exodus 16:4, 14-15; from Exodus 16 [NRSVUE]

Friday morning, I open my pocket prayer book and read praise to God ‘who is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine’ (Eph. 3:20). Sunday morning, the preacher recites the same line from the pulpit. I start at the unexpected repetition, sit thinking the paucity of our asking, the skimpiness of our imagination. I have this on my mind as I come to read — again, and hoping for the first time — Exodus 16.

Exodus 16. The story of bread from heaven [Exod. 16:4]. Flaky stuff, fine as frost [16:14], like coriander seed, and honey sweet [16:31]. Each of you gather what you need, Moses tells God’s people [16:16]. Some gather more, some gather less, but each finds they have gathered not too much nor too little, but for each tent-hold enough [16:17-18]. Manna rains down as an unexpected and precisely calibrated grace. Bread for the day.

Bread is given for the people’s hunger, and bread is given as a test, whether the people will follow God’s teaching or not [16:4]. I resist the word ‘test,’ at first, as if its purpose is our failure. But teachers do not test students to fail them but so that they learn, and show they know. What if God’s test, too, is invitation rather than stumbling block? What if its purpose is the possibility of practice?

The practice of dailiness: each morning gathering. The practice of sufficiency: each household having enough. The practice of consumption: heavenly bread hoarded breeds maggots and stinks [16:20]. The practice of pause: on the sixth day, double portions are gathered and kept for the seventh, for no bread falls on the Sabbath [16:22-27]. The practice of trust that underlies all of these.

I picture it covering the ground, a flaky frost of honey-sweet seeds. I imagine God’s people getting up early, going out in the morning’s first freshness to gather and prepare it. I wonder how it can be boiled or baked [16:23] yet melt in the heat of the sun [16:21], how kept over, it grows foul, except on the sixth day, when it stays good for the next day’s eating [16:24-26]. The logic of my questions is preoccupied with natural processes; the logic of the text is that these realities do not constrain God’s power, nor God’s will to work life beyond our asking, beyond our imagining.

I notice, then, that God’s people do not ask in this text. Not at first. They assume a dread outcome. They (implicitly) accuse Moses and God of — at best — culpable neglect. They do not ask.

God has brought them out of slavery in Egypt. They had groaned under the burden of their oppression [Exod 2:23], then praised God at their salvation [15:1-21]. Now, six weeks after singing, they seem to claim Egypt as a halcyon place: they were proximate to fleshpots, ate their fill of bread [16:1-3]. Better for God to have struck them down with full bellies there, they protest [16:4]. They know they will die from hunger. They do not ask for bread. Can they not imagine the possibility? Do they not trust its realization? Are their spirits still so broken by their cruel slavery [Exod 6:9] that they cannot hear that they were redeemed not for a different form of death but for life?

God hears their complaint. Heavenly bread is God’s response to the people’s need — an implicit refutation of the implicit accusation. Heavenly bread is God’s answer to the question the people have not asked, and heavenly bread draws from the people a question they could not have asked before. The people see this unexpected, unexpectable, coriander-seed-honey-sweet-fallen frost-flake — and they say to each other, ‘Man hu?’ ‘What is it?’ [Exod 16:15]. Their encounter with this miracle bread jolts them out of their anxiety into a present wonder, an explicit asking. What is it?

‘This is the bread the LORD has given you to eat’ [16:15]. Moses tells them to gather, and how much, and that it is to be eaten, not kept over [16:16-19], except on the sixth day, for the Sabbath [16:22-26]. Moses’ answer defines the ‘what’ not by its substance but by its source and its purpose. Here’s what to do with it, Moses says, here’s how to be in relationship with it. Daily. Sufficiently. Consuming. Trusting it will be provided because the provider of it can be trusted.

The question the people are surprised into asking becomes the name of the substance that surprised them: manna. The word an abiding reminder of gift beyond expectation or imagination. An invitation to persistent practice. A test not meant for failure but for formation, for coming to know [16:6, 12].

Manna. Summons to risk the asking that expands the trust, enlarges the imagination, extends the knowing. Gather and eat and taste the sweetness.

Here, in the wilderness, turn and see the glory of the LORD [16:9-10].

Labyrinth Progress

photograph (c) Katherine Brown

And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go up to me on the mountain and be there. And I will give to you the tablets of stone and the instruction and the commandment which I wrote for their teaching.’

Exodus 24:12 [my translation], from Exodus 24:1-18 [NRSVUE] *

There’s a labyrinth in the woods where we walk. It doesn’t seem to be an official installation; no park signs herald its presence. We noticed it a few years ago, probably in winter or early spring, some time when the brush nearest the trail had died back enough that it could be seen. Stones are set in an irregular circle, within which a way is marked. The path starts at the edge, seems aimed directly at the center, then loops back and out, then in again. It’s a little labyrinth, really. Two or three wide strides would carry me entirely across it. Instead, I make my steps small enough to fit in its bounds. I follow the path toward the center, am carried back to the outer edge, then curve around in again. I walk a weaving back and forth, in and out. I hear the breeze rustle last season’s leaves and the creek run over rocks nearby.

Labyrinth progress, walking and reading: in towards the heart, then curving away. Overwhelming theophany, divine summons — all of this has happened before. Already the LORD invited and the people committed to do all which the LORD had spoken (19:1-8). Already the LORD came in cloud thick as kiln-smoke, in thunder and lightning and a trumpet that set flesh to trembling, and Moses, called, went up the mountain and talked with God (19:16-20). Exodus 24 reprises the antiphony of divine speech and human assent: the people promise ‘to do’ and ‘to hear’ (24:7); they are blood-bound in covenant (24:8); and the elders go up and eat and drink in the presence of a shining blue, smooth as pavement and clear as light (24:9-11). They have left Egypt; they are at the mountain. The act of encounter seems complete.

How, then, to understand the LORD’s further invitation to ‘Go up to me … and be,’ the promise of more to be given, instruction written on stone, purposed for teaching (24:12).

Chronological logic may suggest that this invitation is told out of order, came back before ‘all these words’ were declared by the LORD.** Yet maybe chronology is not the primary logic in the narrative. The looping back of the story may be a reminder that seeming completeness is not the same as complete. That Moses is — we are — summoned to further encounter, and encounter again.

The LORD says to Moses, ‘Go up to me on the mountain and be there. And I will give … ’ — promising Moses further gift. Summoning Moses to be in ongoing expectation.

To be in expectation is to recognize that what already is is partial. It is to resist the mistake of conflating our kingdoms with God’s, of claiming our constructions of power and identity as ultimate. To be in expectation is to know that all our going has not yet brought us to the completeness of it all. We suffer still the travails of empire and of wilderness, and we impose them on others and on creation itself. Crises continue, and none of them are new, and all our going has but led us back to the same ground, even the same trenches, newly named but familiar underfoot. It is not that we have never seen God flaming atop a mountain; it is that we mistook that flame for fulfillment. As if our own experience has already encompassed all that God has promised to work. The LORD’s invitation to go up, to be, to be given more reminds us that what is is not what is to be.

There’s also this: the LORD says to Moses, ‘Go up to me on the mountain and be there.’ God is not calling Moses to some divine waiting room (Moses flipping the pages of an outdated periodical till he is seen and handed the scrip for wholeness) but even in a state of expectation, to be in the presence of the glory of the LORD tenting on the mountain in fire and in cloud (24:15-18).

We’re not just waiting for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We’re called to present ourselves to God’s presence even in this state of aching expectation of God’s further gift.

I walk the path towards the heart of the labyrinth, am carried back around the outer edge, then in again, and out until, having walked to the center, I pause, then step in faithfulness to the path’s guiding back out again. To resume walking on the woods trail, beneath the trees and beside the creek. Reminded to be in expectation, reminded — even in ache of brokenness — to persistently listen for the invitation to go up to God and be.

Labyrinth progress, walking and reading: in towards the heart, then curving out for further return.

* The lectionary lists this text for Transfiguration Sunday, the transition into Lent. I’ve been circling towards a center and away again, and continue weaving a way into the Easter season.

** Robert Alter translates Exod 24:1: ‘And to Moses, He had said — ’ using a pluperfect to suggest the slipping of the sequence. [Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: Translation and Commentary (W.W. Norton: 2004) p.455].

The face of God

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”

Genesis 32:30; excerpt from Genesis 32:22-31, lectionary text for Aug. 2, 2020

The alarm rings at 6:30. I shut it off, realize I am awake, get up, and slip out of the sleeping house to walk. Sunlight light gilds the tops of the trees to the west; the rest of the world drowses in its own shadow. I set off down the hill, counting on its slope to pull me into some sort of pace. I have trouble walking at first. My stride is shortened by my hip joint catching. I stop to try to shake or stretch out the click then continue on, attentive to my step until it lengthens slightly. Maybe this is my entry into the text: my hip joint sticky and my stride slightly askew. Me and Jacob limping into the day.

Jacob wrestling. God wrestling. This text is familiar as these neighborhood streets, grown more familiar these months mostly at home. I try to pay heed to the slant of the light, shifts in the greens. I move through air that breezes warm and moist as breath. As if the world around me is alive, and clinging to my skin as I pass. Clinging as close as that stranger did to Jacob? As close as Jacob to he? Close enough to touch and disjoint. Close enough to hold for blessing.

I teach this text every semester of Intro. I point out to students how Genesis 32 connects back to 28, how wrestling and demanding are affirmed as part of relationship. Look at the names, I say. Beth-el. Isra-el. Peni-el. House of God. Wrestles God. Face of God. Jacob encounters God. Jacob demands, and Jacob wrestles, and for all these pains, Jacob is renamed and blessed.

These connections can feel as rote as my route through the neighborhood. First the downhill, then a longer loop. Usually I turn right, to the east and have to squinch my eyes against the dazzle of the sun. Today I turn left, away from the sun. My shadow stretches long and slender before me. Not having to half-close my eyes against sun too bright for human sight, I can look and see all that it is lighting. Pavement. Parked cars. Brick houses and grassy yards and leafy trees, crepe myrtles blooming pink and cream and purple and red. Bright zinnias and giant sunflowers and crinkle-blossom hibiscus. Other early walkers.

Turn differently in this text. The same streets, verses, words, but a different route. The relationship between Jacob and God is not itself all that is at stake. Jacob’s reunion with his brother brackets this pivot of God-wrestling. Twenty years before, Esau had howled in anguish that his trickster brother was truly named — the twin who had grabbed Esau’s heel having grabbed as well Esau’s birthright and blessing. Jacob has reason to fear Esau. Heel-grabbing Jacob now grabs at a stranger, grapples and holds, refuses to let go. Blessing and a new name (blessing as a new name?) are bestowed: ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’ The explanation of the name discloses that more is implicated than relationship with God alone. Jacob has contended with God. Now Jacob-Israel must go forward and contend with his twin.

Limping into the day, Jacob sees his brother coming. Esau falls on him and hugs him (an embrace as close as wrestling?) and weeps and kisses his twin. The brothers fence in speech yet amid the glint of their words parrying comes this glowing gem: ‘Truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God—since you have received me with such favor.’

Jacob has seen God’s face. Now he is able to claim the same in the face of his long-distant twin. It reads as if this glimpse is the reason, the aim, of the other: encounter with God for the sake of encounter with brother.

Jacob wrestling tells as well why I return to this book so persistently, every day walking words that feel familiar underfoot. Wrestling with the text, I experience encounter. The blessing that comes, when it does, is the twist of stride and sight that is less the face to face glimpse of a brightness so bright as to dazzle my seeing and more the realization that when looking on the face of another — brother, neighbor, stranger-among-you — I am seeing what that brightness lights.

‘Truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.’

I round back up the hill towards home.

Stitching Stones

Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the LORD stood beside him and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel; but the name of the city was Luz at the first.

Genesis 28:10-19; lectionary text for Sunday July 19, 2020

I’m struggling to tally time now that we’re in the long green season. Recurring commitments are fewer. Variable days sum to patternless weeks with no rhythm of effort and ease that I can identify, lean into, find myself carried upon. Plans for fall teaching remain preliminary; each institution anticipates a different mix of online and in-person instruction. I should plan my own courses, however tentative they must needs be, but trying to make firm a small ground in a sea of indeterminacy itself overwhelms. It is exhausting to be in an in-between space. I have company worldwide, I know, all of us floundering together in the demands of our own dailiness amid pandemics viral and political. The waves of our efforts alternately criss-cross and pile up. Notwithstanding such good and broad company, I am tired. Where do I rest?

‘A certain place.’ The precise imprecision of the phrase tugs. It sounds as in-between as I feel now. It is somewhere. It might be anywhere. It is the place to which Jacob has come at that point in time, and because the time is after sunset, it is the place where Jacob lies down. He sets a stone — a small firm ground in a sea of indeterminacy — and he sets himself to sleep in that ‘certain place.’ Jacob is leaving his country, his kindred, his father’s house not because he has been summoned thence by the LORD but because he has been sent away by that very father, from that very kindred, lest his angry elder twin slay him and his mother who loves him lose both her sons in one day. Jacob grabbed his brother’s share; his letting go of home is the reaping he’s sown. Embattled brothers — Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau — the lectionary texts of these weeks chime too closely with the news, which itself overwhelms. But there’s no rest in just noticing the pattern of disputed inheritance, grappled-for blessing. There must be something more. We’ve a long journey to go, all the way to Haran. There’s justice to bring; a pandemic to navigate; courses to plan; dinner to get; laundry to do. I haul the basket downstairs to sort the clothes. I spy a loose thread, tug to follow it back to its source, and realize that the hem on my dress is unraveling, along with so much else. I pause sorting, find scissors and the sewing box, cut the machine-stitched thread and thread each end in turn through a needle, so that I can restitch the hem, knot it securely off.

‘A certain place.’ It is a particular place, location undefined. Then it turns into ‘this place’ — the place where the LORD is, therefore ‘awesome,’ ‘the house of God … and the gate of heaven.’ In the place, in the night, Jacob lay down with a stone at his head, and Jacob saw the ladder, angel-traversed, and saw and heard the LORD. To Jacob, God reiterates the promise given Abraham, given Isaac: land and seed and blessing for all the earth. To Jacob, the LORD adds a word: ‘Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’

Usually I skim God’s speech as repetition of what God had told Jacob’s father and grandfather. The dream-vision of the stair to heaven is so fantastic as to cast what follows in its shadow. But Jacob, waking, doesn’t talk of a ladder or of angels. Jacob, waking, talks of the LORD ‘in this place.’ Jacob, waking, is afraid. The ladder and the anointed stone are striking brackets, but God’s speech is the center on which the whole turns. God promises Jacob presence-with and does so distinctly: ‘I will not leave you until I have done what I promised.’ Read it again: ‘I will not leave you until ….’ Somehow the ‘until,’ to me, intensifies the promise. Its implicit contingency — that the abiding will end — adds urgency. God cleaves to Jacob, a commitment as sharp and clinging as that of marriage, and does so not first for Jacob’s sake but for God’s own fidelity to God’s own purpose.

Maybe Jacob hefted God’s promise in his hand as a round weight around which his fingers could curl and be comforted. Maybe Jacob felt God’s promise as a rock in his shoe, a sharp-edged pebble that never settled enough to be ignored but repeatedly shifted in mute insistence on its irritating presence. Maybe Jacob felt both: God’s purpose as demand on Jacob; and also God’s purpose as demand for Jacob.

Jacob wakes and sets up his stone as witness. Jacob will not stay, but the stone will. A wordless statement of the encounter. A small firm ground in the vast and moving sea. And, having set up the stone, Jacob moves on from there. That ‘certain place’ was not a large space, after all. An overnight only. There are miles to go, flocks to keep, wives to marry, sons to beget. There will be a day to return, another night — this one spent sleepless. There will be return and reunion. Meanwhile, there is this stone of Beth-el, house-of-God. Meanwhile, there is God’s presence-with. Persistent for the accomplishment of God’s purpose; insistent on Jacob’s participation in it. God holding Jacob up; God hauling Jacob on.

The anointed stone does not punctuate the start of Jacob’s story, nor its end. It is a knot in the thread that keeps the seam from unraveling. God had a will for the world’s blessing before Jacob was born to be part of it; a will for Jacob’s part before Jacob was grown to carry it; a will to carry Jacob when Jacob will not carry himself.

Is there rest in that for me? A bit of firmness to hold, be held by? An overnight, even if vivid dreams inhibit restful sleep?

The machine chimes the end of the load. I shake the wet wash straight, pull the wrinkles out of cotton dresses, stretch the line from house to tree, and hang the clothes outside to dry in the heat. I pause and check the restitched hem. It’s held. That’s one bit of firmness to add to the text’s reminder that God’s purpose is for blessing and that God’s will is persistent — abiding with me, even in spite of me, insistent for me when I cannot insist for myself. It’s not rest, exactly, but a knot to my thread as the stone was to Jacob’s, that holds against unravelling. One cannot go back, but a new seam can be sewn, a new pattern shaped to God’s purpose. One stone — stitch — at a time.

Hineini!

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

Genesis 22:1-2; from Genesis 22:1-14, lectionary text for Sunday June 28, 2020

I am circling this text. Going round and round it, searching for a way in. I’ve been circling this text for days. That ache along the back my neck must come from keeping my head continually craned and taut in its direction, fixing my gaze on the it. Did I think it might stretch out and leap upon me if I relaxed my vigilance? Or did I circle and watch in hopes of seeing the story crack open of itself, reveal to me its meaning. It’s a hard text to hold as a center.

Genesis 22, the ‘Akedah’ or ‘binding’ of Isaac. This was the first biblical text I encountered in Hebrew, it being the first full story presented in the textbook used. We had barely made the acquaintance of the Hebrew alphabet when we were pitchforked into this harrowing tale. The necessary slowness of our translating increased the tension of the story’s unfolding. If verse 1 had the charm of first encounter with vocabulary and grammar, verse 2 immediately raised the stakes. God’s words to Abraham increase in specificity — ‘Take your son, your only, the one whom you love, Isaac’ — son Laughter named at the end of the series of phrases as if the crown of all that had come before — ‘and go to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a whole offering.’

Offer up your son as offering.

Did our breaths catch in our throats as we read? Was our protest of God’s command or Abraham’s silent compliance? ‘And Abraham rose early in the morning,’ as dutiful in taking his son Isaac to be offering as he had been in sending his son Ishmael into the wilderness. Abraham had been distressed on account of Ishmael. Abraham had argued with God about Sodom, for the sake of God’s own justice. But for this son, this only, this one whom he loves, for Isaac, Abraham does not speak.

We read on, word by painful word. Abraham goes with a donkey and two ‘boys’ and his son. ‘The boy I will go there,’ Abraham says and lays the wood on his son and they walk on together. Isaac says ‘My father.’ ‘Here I am,’ Abraham answers Isaac as he had answered God, adding now, ‘my son.’ The two of them walk on together. The camera pulls back until the moving figures are small in the landscape, ascending the hill Abraham had seen. See the two boys and the donkey somewhere near the bottom of the screen; waiting for they know not what.

Then comes verse 9. The camera comes in close, and the motion slows to a snail’s pace; each step discretely delineated. Abraham builds an altar. Abraham lays the wood in order. Abraham binds his son Isaac. Abraham lays his bound son on top of the altar, on top of the wood. Abraham stretches out his hand and takes the knife to slay his son. The sinews in his hand stand out taut; his knuckles are white. The knife is held with definite intention. The edge of the blade is visible, quivering poised.

The turning world stops. A voice from heaven calls, and Abraham replies — for the third time, ’Here I am.’ And God says, ‘Now I know ….’ God has learned something God had not known. The offering of Isaac ends in the sacrifice of the ram. Abraham names the place.

The story is ended but does not feel resolved. I read and read, circle and study and stare, until my eyes are dry and the ache in my neck has spread down my back.

I want a tidy ending. I want space in which to breathe, green grass to lie down in and quiet waters to drink, a respite to gather myself for the next phase of the journey. I know more is coming. I know it must. We’re only in the 22nd chapter of the first book of the Bible, after all. We’ve only just renewed our recognition that ‘All’ hasn’t included ‘Black’ since the first African slaves were brought to these shores, if not before that. There is so much journey yet to go.

It’s not just that I’m already tired, it’s that I cannot see the way to the end. I can’t count the steps, don’t know how to pace myself to get there. (God sends Abraham to ‘the place I will show you’ and doesn’t tell him how far away the place will be.). It’s that the promise is old — ‘I will make of you a great nation’; ’all men are created equal’; ‘in Order to form a more perfect Union’ — but still unrealized, its shape unformed, its edges blurred. It’s that the transforming power of that original vision — ‘in you all families of the earth shall be blessed’; to ‘establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare’ — has been continually undermined by our own failures of trust, of vision, of steadfast commitment.

I’ve spent days in this text. Not just these most recent nor that first encounter in Hebrew but the teaching and preaching done of it since. Maybe part of my tired is that the questions that seem to spring soonest are the ones that let us off the hook. Which is worse: God having asked the sacrifice or Abraham offering it up? God ‘testing’ Abraham with the ask or God needing to test at all? We are prompt to interrogate the text. Are we ready to ask the same questions of ourselves? Is this story of traumatic encounter about Abraham and God only or is it also about us?

After all, we still offer up our own. Worse yet, we offer up those we do not count as ‘ours.’ We draw lines between, create categories of difference, and claim self-preservation as justification for all. We hoard our own welfare, present and future, as if we can be sufficient to our providing, if only we are diligent enough, vigilant enough. Abraham, at least, offers his son, his only, the one whom he loves, Isaac. Abraham offers up the promise he has been moving towards since Genesis 12, the seed and covenant future that God has named due through Isaac. Abraham responds to nothing less than the direct and inscrutable word of God, who speaks no promise or condition but only command.

God calls Abraham and Abraham responds, ‘Hineini’ — ‘Here I am!’ — or in a more literal rendering, ‘Behold — me!’ And maybe in that subtle reference to vision the story cracks itself open just a little bit to my sight, revealing not an answer to a puzzle but a promise that is almost enough.

God calls Abraham’s name, and Abraham answers, ‘See — me.’ On the third day, Abraham ‘lifts his eyes’ and ‘sees’ the place. When Isaac asks his father about the offering, Abraham replies ‘God will see for himself the lamb’ — the idiom of provision comes from the statement of God’s vision. After his hand is stayed, Abraham ‘lifts his eyes’ and ‘sees’ the ram. Seeing, vision, appearing is held as well in the name Abraham gives the place: ‘The LORD sees’ for here ‘the LORD is seen.’

Maybe we call this story ‘the binding’ less because that verb occurs once within it than because we feel ourselves bound. Tangled up in the text and its traditions. Shackled in the circumstances and structures of the past times that have led to us here in our own, that have constrained our present living and our ability to see ahead, limiting the future by our own gaze. Yet the motif that recurs in this story is God seeing, God being seen, God seeing to what is necessary to God’s goal. Can we rename the text and re-place ourselves in it? Not as those waiting the edge, unaware of what transpires on the mountain, but as those for whom that encounter is central.

God sees. Truly this claim is insufficient to assuage my discomfort with the text or with my context. God’s sight does not tell me where the place will be, or how long it will take to get there. Yet it is almost enough to aim and sustain me towards the next step. God sees. That claim of vision tugs me — protest and all — beyond my own sight. No longer bound by the past but moving into the future divinely envisioned and powerfully promised. Justice. Welfare. Blessing. For all.

See. Me.

Say his name!

The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.

When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

Genesis 21:8-21; lectionary text for Sunday June 21, 2020

Sarah’s urgency and Abraham’s inertia and God’s inscrutable assent to the casting out of Hagar and Ishmael make this a hard text at any time. To read it these days as the nation continues to roil with racial reckoning long past due is even harder. Convicting. On its face this text seems to unquestioningly endorse the separation of the two brothers — God enjoins the act — yet the narrator’s sympathy is with Hagar and Ishmael. The text seeks to be read from their point of view. I have imagined Sarah’s years-long plight of being but Abraham’s ‘barren’ wife, going when and where and because Abraham goes with no voice of her own, mute even as she is offered by her husband to one king and then another, suffering knowing that she is too old for any newness now. But now I feel the anguish of being sent away out into the wilderness as if I myself am Hagar.

We were just at a feast, celebrating the safe birth and weaning of Isaac, God’s promise-child, Sarah’s long awaited Laughter. It was a great feast. And now? Now I am sent away with my child — our child, Abraham, our child! The son that you and Sarah together got of me. The feast may continue for you, for them, but for me and for our son, this 16 year old boy-man, there is but some bread and a skin of water. How long will that last in the midbar, the desert wilderness in which water is scant? We were just at a feast rejoicing that nothing is too wonderful for the LORD, that Laughter had been born and heard and named in our midst, and suddenly everything turned. For what? Because our son, Ishmael, was ‘joking’? ’playing’? ‘mocking’? ‘Isaac-ing’?* Because suddenly Sarah is frightened for her son, our son must be driven out?

There was a moment I might even have laughed with Sarah’s God-brought laughter. She herself foretold that all would. Yet already I’ve forgotten whatever mirth there might have been. Sarah’s own joy is already ended. She cut it short herself. Her vision is too small. She looks at our son, Abraham, yours and mine, and sees him only as an alternate Isaac, a reminder of those barren years before and a competitor for her son’s future inheritance. What is that inheritance, Abraham? Is it not that all the earth should be blessed? In her zeal for her son’s full measure, Sarah has cut off her own joy. She had laughed and spoken the world to laugh with her. Now Sarah speaks to cast out half the world — as measured in sons of Abraham.

Our son. Ishmael — say his name, Abraham. Though Sarah does not, you at least should name him, for he is your son too, on whose account you are distressed. Say his name, Abraham! Say it aloud! ‘Ishmael’ — ‘God hears’ — Ishmael, our son, yours and mine. Our son is as truly God-named as is your son with Sarah. Both of them have names given by the LORD. Why can you not say his name aloud? Is it because you are afraid to say aloud the truth that ‘God hears’? That God heard my cry before our son was born? That God might hear our cries again?

Say his name, Abraham. Ishmael. God hears. Say it!

God does hear. God will hear.

Will God hear?

I cried out at Abraham. I demanded our son’s name from his mouth.

Or did I?

Was it only in my head that my voice was heard? Was I, in reality, as silent as Sarah who — having spoken that word of expulsion — spoke no more?

Ishmael. God hears. My lips move. But do I say it? Can I any longer trust the name’s claim when the God himself did not speak it to Abraham, did not speak either of our names, but gave us the titles that Sarah had used, that Abraham had used.

We have wandered. Our water is gone. I have left him. Cast out because of him, sent away with him, now I walk away from him. I will not, cannot watch him die. I lift my voice. Does he? Does he cry? Does he hear?

Which ‘he’ even do I mean?

ve-Ishma-el-ohim reads the Hebrew text. ‘And God heard.’ The name of my son held in that phrase. The name that Sarah would not say, that Abraham could not say, that the LORD God did not say. Ishmael, God hears, now cries out from the text itself. As the blood of the murdered Abel cried out from the ground. As the cutting off of peoples causes stones of the house to protest and plaster of the wall to respond. As the stones of the city will cry out the presence of the Christ if his followers themselves do not. The text telling my story returns to me the name of my son. No more is he ‘the boy,’ ‘the child,’ son of ‘Hagar the Egyptian,’ ‘the slave woman.’ The text becomes the testimony. Murmurs my son’s name in the larger claim.

ve-Ishma-el-ohim: ‘And God heard.’ Saying the name moves the story from desperate need to divine response. God heard. And God called and renewed and expanded God’s promise and opened my eyes to the life-giving water. ve-Ishma-el-ohim: ‘And God heard.’

‘A future with hope’ unfolds.

‘Make strong your hand in his,’** God tells Hagar.

The story inserts itself into my own hand, clenched as it is in anguish for persistent division and in aching uncertainty for how to move towards justice. The text pushes itself in, makes itself strong within my palm. My fingers ease and curl around its strength. I am lifted to do the next thing: to name aloud the claim that within the story God himself does not utter but does fulfill.

Ishmael. God hears.

Say the name. Say all their names. That act shifts the whole story. Align myself with the text’s own subtle work of inclusion and reconciliation and wholeness. God’s promise for each and for all. That all the families of the earth will be blessed.

* The Hebrew verb in 21:3 is a form of the verb ‘to laugh,’ from which the name ‘Isaac’ comes. The Hebrew text reads ‘Sarah saw the son of Hagar, whom she bore to Abraham, playing.’ The phrase in the NRSV ‘with her son Isaac’ is in the Greek, not the Hebrew.

** This is the literal Hebrew of God’s command in Gen 21:18, ‘Hold him fast with your hand.’

All God’s People Prophets

So Moses went out and told the people the words of the LORD; and he gathered seventy elders of the people, and placed them all around the tent. Then the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.

Numbers 11:24-25; excerpt from 11:24-30; alternate lectionary for Pentecost Sunday, 5.31.20

Sundays I get up and start coffee and check church email early, to learn any changes to the order of worship before we’re all logged on to Zoom. Last Sunday morning I saw a message that my church and another, about four blocks up Georgia Avenue, planned to line the road on either side for a COVID-appropriately masked and distanced demonstration in support of racial justice. I read the email and my first reaction was an almost wild frustration: I already have plans, I don’t have time for this, I have things that I need to do. My second reaction — nearly coincident with the first save that nanosecond’s difference that requires me to admit the order in which they came — was a deep shame that as a white woman I could choose to avoid dealing with this issue when so many others have no choice in the matter. That shame came with an accompanying conviction — welling up swiftly, as if in flood, and overwhelming me with its power — that the fact that I can choose to abstain is the very reason why I cannot choose to abstain. I found a piece of cardboard, and I crayoned on my phrase*, and Sunday evening I joined several hundred standing along both sides of the road, holding up to oncoming traffic the words that had hauled us from our homes and plans and required of us presence, and statement. The light was clear; the air was mild; the breeze was sweet.

‘When the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.’

Numbers 11 had held me already a week by then, as the news turned from a primary focus on the COVID-pandemic to the nation convulsed with a fresh recognition of racism’s horrifically persistent and destructive pervasiveness. (Periodically we toy with renewing this recognition. When will we move on to true reckoning and transformation?) I lived that turn through this text. Reading its telling of 70 elders and the spirit. Reading news stories of deaths — Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd only the most recently famous — of demonstrations and riot police and photo ops. Reading text, and reading context, and reading each reading each other the while.

‘When the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.’

The LORD puts spirit on the elders, and they are caught in its power, carried out of themselves and into a frenzy. That’s what it is to prophesy in the Bible: to be overcome with the power of the LORD (1 Sam 10:5-13). The encounter knocks you flat then pulls you standing (Ezek 1:26-2:5). Even when the work is described in terms of speech rather than ecstasy, it is a word that burns and cannot be contained, a flame that must be shouted aloud (Jer 20:8-9). To prophesy is to be subject to the power of the spirit, to be the word’s servant rather than its master. One does not grab the word and hold it aloft. One is grabbed by the word, held by the hair, lifted up and away (Ezek 8:1-4).

‘When the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.’

The seventy elders have been gathered for this encounter because the community in the wilderness is convulsed with a fresh set of complaining, ‘strong craving’ and weeping (Num 11:1-9). Moses himself is ‘displeased’ and angry with God. I didn’t conceive or bear or birth this people, Moses argues, ‘I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me’ (Num 11:10-15). God responds and directs Moses to gather seventy elders who will share the work of leading the people through the wilderness. This is the backdrop to the elders’ experience of the spirit and their however-brief/however-timeless frenzy of possession.

This context of a people riven by strife and the need for leaders to ‘bear the burden of the people’ (Num 11:16-18) revises my idea of what is what is at stake in the elders’ experience. What I had thought mattered so that the community would see that these seventy were God’s appointed leaders, I now realize mattered so that the seventy themselves would have had this direct and destabilizing encounter with the LORD.

The LORD who sees and hears and knows the sufferings of the oppressed, who does not stand far off but comes down to deliver (Exod 3:6-10). ‘The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’ (Exod 34:6-7). The LORD who is ‘God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing’ (Deut 10:17-18).

The elders need to be overwhelmed by that awareness and alignment and commitment so that — initiating prophetic frenzy past — they can lead the people as God wills. Attuned to the oppressed. Executing justice for the vulnerable. Extending love beyond kin, beyond neighbor, until even the ‘stranger’ is fed and clothed and fully folded into the whole. The elders’ experience of the spirit was necessary not as an end in itself but as a means of giving that glimpse of God’s end for them all.

Last Sunday was a hundred years ago. Every day since, there has been news of another protest, summons to another rally. Yesterday (Friday) at 5 p.m. communities of faith lined 16th Street from Dupont Circle in Washington D.C. up until and beyond the district line. We stood in vigil holding signs near the end of 16th Street, just before 16th curves and joins Georgia Avenue. Cars and vans and buses passed; many honked or flashed lights in support. About 5:45, the rain started. It came down in buckets, soaking through signs and clothes and shoes. Still we stood, signs held high, heads bowed against the sky’s crashing sobs. We stood until the lightning and thunder came together, then we fled back to our cars through rainwater rivers running swift down the sides of the streets.

‘When the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.’ The nation continues to convulse. I pray it is a birth, not another false labor. I pray that our encounter with the spirit’s compulsion persists even after the frenzy of protests and rallies and vigils is past. It should pass. The summons to protest is not an end in itself but a necessary stage along the way. May this spell of God-sight guide us into and through the spiritual and social and legislative work of reckoning, repentance, and reconciliation.

‘Would that all the LORD’S people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!’ (Num 11:29).

*My daughter pointed out that the Bible verses written in ink on my sign would not be legible to passing traffic. I replied that the verses were written there for me; these were the words that required me to get up and go. The sign made for Sunday was soaked through by Friday’s rain. The crayon letters remain on the now-dried and oddly twisted cardboard but the ink was washed away. No matter. The words remain written in this image and remain written in my heart.

Night Waiting

The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you. …

Exodus 12:1-2, excerpt from Exodus 12:1–4, 11-14, lectionary text during Holy Week, 2020

I am writing this on Good Friday. It is night. All day today the wind blew, great gusts of wind, soughing through the trees and around the house. I sat at my desk and looked out the window at tall trees swaying back and forth and smaller trees bending on a swifter, tighter arc. I watched and imagined the new green leaves of the pear tree and the cream blossoms of the dogwood holding tight as the wind played crack the whip with their branches. I took a walk outside. The wind buffeted my body and roared around my ears. The afternoon was bright blue; white clouds scudded across the sky.

Now it is night. I listen and hear quiet and realize the wind has fallen. The rising, rushing vigor of the day has ebbed. Now is the dark; now is the waiting.

Exodus 12 is the text for Maundy Thursday, the celebration of Jesus’ last supper with his closest disciples. Exodus 12 gives the Passover command, ‘take a lamb,’ and tells the reason. The LORD is about to execute judgment on all the gods of Egypt, the false powers that enslave and oppress and destroy, but will ‘pass over’ the households which have marked their identity with the blood of the lamb. Death shall not destroy these households that have marked themselves as God’s own. Exodus 12 works well for this night too, for the Lamb has been lifted up. There has been blood — enough for sign. The work is completed. But the work is not over.

I am writing this on Good Friday. It is night and dark and quiet. And I am waiting for the rest of the work. I am waiting for beginning.

‘This month shall mark for you the beginning of months.’ Of the whole passage, that is the phrase that has held me this week. This month the beginning of months. It came upon me unexpected. I had remembered the lamb, the command to share, the girded loins and hurried eating. I had remembered the preparation. I had forgotten the beginning. The word came as an unlooked-for present — a treasure to hold cupped in one’s hands, a tender seed to brood over and watch until it cracks and sprouts, sends forth roots and shoots and leaves, grows into something too great to be contained in one’s own grasp, something that withstands the strongest of winds.

‘This month shall mark for you the beginning of months.’ Beginning. Not starting over. Not returning again to some earlier point. Beginning. Going on through to the next.

This is the strangest Lent of my memory. We gave up church — congregating our bodies as body, I mean. We gave up going to work and school (aware of our fortune in being able to work and teach and learn from home). We gave up going to the grocery on a whim, leaving the house even just to walk without a thought (aware of our fortune in having a house, a space in which to walk). We gave up gatherings and plans, a careless ease, and — as a nation — any illusion (ill-founded as it was) of some inherent immunity to instability, to pain, to loss.

‘This month shall mark for you the beginning of months.’ Not going back to before, but beginning, going on to a new that cannot yet be seen, that can barely be imagined beyond the promise in the word itself — Beginning.

Tonight is Good Friday. We held worship via Zoom, a liturgy of scripture readings and dramatic monologues. A candle was extinguished after each; seven candles, one by one. A soloist sang from his home, a capella, into his computer screen, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord …’. One candle was left. The last speaker held it cupped in her hand, its flame lit her face as she prayed, then she placed it again on its stand. Its light was small but steady against the dark. A woodwind played ‘What wondrous love is this.’ On a whim, I changed to gallery view and saw on my screen the faces of forty-some households, each shown in its own neat square. So many faces. Each face was absolutely individual, yet all seemed to bear a common mark — an expression equally mixed of ache and of hope — borne of the words and of the music — an awareness of separation and a longing for reunion. Or so I read their faces, before tears came to my own eyes.

‘This month shall mark for you the beginning of months.’ Tonight is Good Friday. It is night and dark and quiet. I am waiting for beginning, and all the world as well, marked with the ache that is God’s own.

Weekly Shop in a Testing Time

He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the LORD, saying, “Is the LORD among us or not?”

Exodus 17:7; from Exodus 17:1-7, lectionary text for Sunday March 15, 2020

I have never seen the grocery so busy on a Friday morning. I take the last of the small carts and wipe it with the last of the sanitizing wipes from the dispenser. Workers are restocking, yet there are gaps in the displays. ‘No carrots?’ I say aloud, surprised. The man who manages produce thinks there may be a case in the back. (There is.) A woman nearby tells me ‘They’re out of toilet paper. It was the first thing I checked.’ Her daughter in California told her that toilet paper is not to be found; she herself is stocked up from Costco; she may send some rolls to her daughter. The store is not lacking in vivid green St. Patricks Day cheer: cardboard shamrocks sign displays of Kelly-frosted cupcakes, green-sugared cookies, and Irish soda bread (which is normal soda-bread color).

The sense of something looming seems palpable in the presence and intensity of so many shoppers. None of us here is obviously sick. We don’t know when or if we will be. Yet whatever anxiety each of us feels is shown — at least on this morning, in this place — in gestures of fellowship. Confidences about the procurement of toilet paper; wry grins and comments in the checkout line. (A line in which none of us maintain the recommended six foot distance.) There is a camaraderie in the shared circumstance of unknowing. Maybe because as yet the crisis is coming, but not fully here. Is there something of this waiting time not just to savor but to save? Something that we need to remember, to carry us through whatever it is that may come?

Israel in the wilderness. Out from Egypt and not yet to Sinai. Just saved from slavery, and on the way to covenant, and already this is the third instance of ‘grumbling.’ The people grumble for sweet water, instead of bitter (Exodus 15:24), and for food to eat (16:2-3), and now again for water to drink in this place where there is none (17:1). The conflict has intensified. The people ‘quarrel’ as well as ‘grumble’ (in the NRSV: ‘complain’). Their hostility has increased with their desperation. They are unified in their demand: ‘Give us water’ — all of us, as one, require drink.

In the Hebrew, the demand then takes an interesting turn: ‘Why did you bring us up from Egypt to kill me and my son …?’ See what happened there? The collective has become fragmented. Suddenly what matters is not our need but my own, not our children, but my child. It’s awkward in the Hebrew — the sudden singular ‘me/my’ — and entirely elided in the English translations, which maintain the plural ‘us/our’ throughout, as if that middle shift in number was a grammatical hiccup to be corrected instead of a signal of the people’s fear. The need is real. Water is necessary but there is no water for the people to drink. The panic has set in — what’s at stake, each realizes, is my life, my child’s life. Where there had been an all the people now there is each one of them. For the moment of that phrase, the desperate urgency of their need revealed in the insistence on individuality.

The text ends with the place name explained — Massah-Meribah, Trial-Quarrel. The people quarreled with Moses and tried or tested the LORD. The final line, the accusation the people are accused of making, is what their quarrel sums to: ‘Is the LORD among us or not?’ There is either the LORD in their midst or there is nothing. This demand for water is a demand to know that the LORD is among them. God’s response to Moses takes seriously the need. Water will be provided; the people will drink. God will be present. More than that: God is present.

‘See — me!’ the LORD tells Moses (‘hinneni’), or in the old form of the King James ‘Behold! — me — standing there in front of you.’ God’s speech can be translated and read as if its point is proper attribution of the miracle that will occur: God will stand there, before Moses, and therefore Moses’ gesture will result in the life-giving flow of water. But what if God’s speech is not just about divine power? What if God’s speech is about divine presence? After all, this is what the people’s demand for water sums to: Is the LORD among us or not? ‘See me,’ the LORD tells Moses. It’s not just about the water. It’s about God. See: God is standing there.

I walk home with a bag of groceries hanging from each shoulder. The first yellows of spring — forsythia and daffodils and crocus — are being joined by soft pinks and creams of blossoming trees — magnolia, pear, cherry. The wind is blowing and the branches sway and the air is billowing warm. It is a beautiful day. It is a strange season, unnerving with virus as well as flowers blooming. We are all out of our ordinary. Wandering this period of patterns disrupted and no idea when new ones will be set, or can be set, or even what they might be.

At least one particular morning, in one particular grocery store, the result of each of us shaken out of our pattern seems to be that more of us were seeing each other. Recognizing each other’s presence with comments and smiles and an unusually patient waiting in line. Maybe that’s what we need to save and carry on into this unknown future, near term and far. When the crisis comes full, when the fear becomes acute, when desperation overtakes — resist the urge to regard and cry out only for me, for my own. Even when we keep our ‘social distance,’ spend days apart from others, move work and teaching and worship online, we must keep seeing each other — not only looking out for ourselves. See especially those who are not online but restocking grocery shelves, caring for children, nursing the sick. See each other. Regard the ‘us’ of community.

Is the LORD in our midst or is nothing? That’s the question that the LORD answered, in providing the water and in speaking to Moses: ‘See — me, standing before you….’

Maybe the start of seeing the LORD standing, the LORD present in our midst, is by looking to see each other, the ‘us’ among whom the LORD is present.

Wandering Home*

Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were two hundred five years; and Terah died in Haran.

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. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I 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.” So Abram went, as the LORD had told him.

Gen 11:31-12:4a; expansion of lectionary text for Sunday March 8, 2020.

My name is Abram.

You will know me as Abraham Father of many. You will know me as the rock from which you were hewn, your father of old, whose trust was reckoned as righteousness, who did not withhold even his own son. You will know me as one who was called to go and who went.

But I am not Abraham yet. My name is Abram. And here, at the start of it all, I am not stepping surefooted into any future. I am standing stunned in the remainder of what was. I am seeing it as if for the first time clear-sighted. I am realizing that what I’d taken for shelter turns out to be open to the sky. I wonder if the ruin I now realize is something new or if I have only just noticed what always has been. The shelter seemed sufficient; I never felt the rain. But maybe it had not really rained before. The ground around me is strewn with stones, as if the remains of a fallen building. Not a home. Maybe the foundation for one.

We left our homeland years ago, my father Terah and my wife Sarai and my nephew Lot and myself. My brother already had died. Our father determined to go. We left our homeland, and we set out for Canaan, but we settled elsewhere on our way. It was a place. Good enough for its while. It could not be home — always we were come-theres, not from-theres — but it was a place. We spoke our language and we ate our food and we worshipped our gods and we were together. And I was Abram.

Still I am Abram, but I am no longer sure who Abram is. Was I more Abram when I lived in Ur, with my circle of kindred surrounding? What happened, then, when my brother died? When we left the land of my birth? When we journeyed to another land? The words and food and gods were different. How was I Abram then? And now? My brother is died; my father now too. I have only just realized that I am adrift. Not anchored in any place. This no-place is is not in the land of my birth nor the land we had traveled toward. We had settled here, and I had thought we had built here a stable shelter. But now I look up and see broken walls unroofed, open to the sky. Now I look around and see the ground strewn with stones. Maybe events have tumbled the building; or maybe we never had built the edifice we had imagined, the shelter we had thought we lived in.

Gather myself. Clear the rubble into some sort of order. Set the larger stones here; the smaller pieces there. Maybe a new foundation can be laid.

Gather myself. Or feel myself gathered. Comes a voice. A call. The beginning of a new wondering. Maybe the stones are not for building a home with walls and a roof. Maybe the stones are for laying a road.

I am Abram. Called by God to get up and go. I am Abram, responding to God’s promise that through the process of wondering, and of wandering, I will arrive at the place that is called home.

* Genesis recounts Terah’s death immediately before the LORD’s calling of Abram, as if the two events occur in this order. Elsewhere, Genesis lists the ages of Terah and Abram from which information it can be calculated that Terah did not die until well after Abram had left Haran. But the text on its face suggests a chronological narrative: ‘Terah died in Haran. Now the LORD said to Abram ….’ So that is how I read it this week. See ‘Abraham and Sarah: Genesis 11-22,’ in Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford Bible Series) Oxford University Press; (1993) by David M. Gunn and Danna Nolan Fewell.