Thanks for your help telling the story of Sarah and Abraham! What did you hear in this story? What part did you like best? What part seems most important to you?

Today’s text marks a turning point in the arc of the Genesis story. The first eleven chapters of Genesis take a wide, cosmic view, narrating the creation of earth, humanity’s leaving Eden and the first murder. Then comes a catastrophic flood in response to earth’s wickedness. And finally, Babel: the scattering of people, cultures and languages far and wide across the world. And now, in chapter 12, Genesis narrows its scope, and for the rest of the book focuses only on the fate of one family—Sarah and Abraham and their descendants.

The author gives no explanation for why God chose these two elders in particular. For this reason, they take on a sort of legendary quality, as if they are supposed to represent any of us, and illuminate something about who we are, collectively, as humans. They are too old to start a whole new life, and yet that’s what they must do. They are barren, but promised infinite children and descendants. As their story unfolds, they express doubt, get jealous, and laugh outright at God’s messengers—and yet they also trust God. They teach us that we are limited and fragile, and at the same time, called toward imagination and wild possibility. In our smallness, they remind us, we are part of a larger, longer story. And as we face mortality, we can also hope to experience re-birth.

In this story, God chose to be in relationship with a particular family, chose them to receive a unique blessing. And yet, this blessing was not given only for them. Through them, God set out to bestow a universal blessing on creation. God said to Abraham: “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… in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.” In our culture, when we talk about “blessings” we are often referring to money or stuff. And yet tying divine blessing to a pursuit of personal wealth and limitless accumulation is not biblical. It arises out of the colonizing and extractive culture that has formed us. Amid climate chaos and political crisis, I think we can see very clearly how dangerous and destructive this ideology is.

This ancient story defines blessing as a richness of relationship, as an abundance of collective well-being, and as an experience of belonging. This more-than-material way of thinking about blessing strikes me as crucial for us to recover as we face an uncertain human future. I feel the church (as a whole) being tugged, like Sarah and Abraham before us, to travel away from familiar patterns of life. Even as we seek to be grounded in our history, to learn from who and where we’ve been, I believe we are also being called, at our advanced age, to start over in a brand new land. And the reason for this crazy adventure is blessing. We are meant to be a blessing, and to spread that blessing far beyond ourselves.

Let me tell you the story, as I believe it relates to First Church in particular. There’s no question that throughout our long history, we have served our community. However, I believe that until fairly recently we understood this building to primarily belong to the church, and to house church programs. Maybe that mindset began to shift around 40 years ago, when we became the first official home of Open Arms of Minnesota, and 25 years ago when we created the Southeast Playgroup. We surely reached a turning point six years ago, when, in the wake of COVID isolation, our building sat mostly empty. We took the risk of saying “yes” when the Community Kitchen asked to make this building the base of their operations. Over time, our relationship with the kitchen has evolved into a mutually trusting and beneficial partnership. We’ve done a lot of relational and practical work together to get to that place—everything from negotiating how to share the fridge and storage space to jointly purchasing new kitchen appliances.

We’ve also reconfigured and remodeled office spaces. We now have Byron’s therapy practice, Southeast Seniors, and a musical theater teacher who call this building home. We’re reaching toward a way of sharing space with them that is more than a lease agreement and a monthly check. We want to foster a culture of shared investment in this building and this neighborhood. And then there was Metro Surge. Through those stressful months, we threw our doors open for the neighbors to gather and respond. And we became known, through that time, in a different and deeper way, as an institution deeply rooted in faith that also holds the capacity to collaborate respectfully with diverse people. If you want to get a feeling for this new “vibe” all you have to do is stick around some Sunday afternoon. Soon after coffee hour winds down and we all leave, the Gathering Hall grows full again, of community kitchen volunteers, of bread and produce and hungry neighbors stopping in to see what’s available, of “Neighbors Hang,“ a group that occupies a couple of tables with puzzles or crafts, or pickle-making supplies. And we are having a conversation with these folks about how they can have a stake, financially and through sweat-equity in the well-being of this building so that it can continue to be a space of belonging for all of us.

And amid this ongoing work of opening our doors, we decided to join the “resilience hub” program sponsored by Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light. This program defines “resilience hubs” as “energy efficient, community-serving places that have the resources and connections needed to support community members both in moments of crisis and in the everyday.” We can’t predict exactly how climate chaos and political turmoil will manifest itself in our community—and yet we know that it is and it will. And we want to be prepare our infrastructure and our relational networks. We want to be ready. So we have leaders from the justice league working together with folks from the neighborhood group, attending monthly gatherings over the next year, and together, creating a plan to increase and sustain our capacity to be a resilience hub.

Underpinning this new behavior—of sharing this building in partnership with the community—is, I believe, also a new theology, a de-colonizing theology. Our ancestors in faith, Sarah and Abraham, and their great family, the Hebrew prophets, the rabbi Jesus, they all teach us that blessing is mutual. Blessing doesn’t flow only one way. We are blessed. We are a blessing. Blessing is a Venn diagram of overlapping circles. It’s an ever-expanding scope of belonging. We cannot be who we are called to be without a diverse set of partners who are also fully themselves. Nor can they be who they are supposed to be, without us. Blessing is collective well-being, just, loving and creative relationship with the land and each other, so that the human story can go on, so the web of all life can dwell in a harmony as beautiful and expansive as the stars burning in the sky and the ancient grains of dust beneath our feet. Amen.