In You all the Families of the Earth Shall be blessed

As we who are God’s people prayerfully travel together this Lenten journey of reflection and repentance, I am led back to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. As I seek to understand and to live into my relationships with God and God’s people, I see and understand the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testaments to be the foundation for all of our relationships. This week I am seeking to build on this foundation as I reflect on my relationship to all of God’s people and how God calls us to relate to one another.

My reflection has been guided by reading and re-reading and meditating on two passages which the Episcopal Church recommends for the second Sunday in Lent.

“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. . .so that you will be a blessing. . .and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-4a)

 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:1-17)

 

Abraham was led by God to a place unknown to him. In fact, God told him, when you get there, I will let you know. God promised to bless him and his family, and his descendents and to make him a great nation. Who doesn’t want to be a great nation? But God did not stop there; he promised Abraham that not only would he and his family be blessed, but that “all the families of the Earth would be blessed through him.”

 

Likewise, Jesus tells the Jewish leader Nicodemus that, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

 

I am convinced that God often leads us, either literally or figuratively or both, into new lands, both challenging us and blessing us. On these journey’s into the unknown, we must depend on the gifts God has given us, as well as the Holy Spirit, to “lead us and guide us into all truth.”

 

In our world today, we are very often afraid to go into new lands, or new situations, and we can be just as afraid to welcome people who are different from us, either racially or religiously, into our own lands. We do not know the language or the customs of places to which we are led, and I suspect that people who come to our land have the same fear and discomforts that we have.

 

Our world is indeed filled with dangers and challenges and hatred, but it is also filled with beauty, joy, wonder and love. How do we, like Abraham, balance our legitimate fears with the blessing God has given us in allowing “all the families of the Earth to be blessed through us.”

 

I believe this is the message Jesus was attempting to communicate to Nicodemus: That you and I cannot, alone, solve all the world’s problems; that we cannot save the world.

 

But that: “God sent his Son into the world, in order that the world might be saved through him.”  And then, thanks be to God, God chose us to be partners with Jesus, to be his vessels through which He saves the whole world and blesses all the families of the Earth.