“A Pilgrimage of Blessings”

The Bible greets us with the proclamation, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. This first verse is a grand declaration, welcoming God as the Creator. It’s like a doorknob that opens into the world of the Bible, and by grabbing that doorknob, we enter the great world of the Word. And after the creation story, which continues up to Genesis 11, we hear much of God’s displeasure with humans; from Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden, to Noah getting drunk after the flood, to the halted tower building at Babel.  And then, in this chapter, I would say the ‘real story’ of the Old Testament begins as God enters into a relationship with one particular person and his family.

Abram’s Immigrant Journey

Abram’s immigration journey begins with God’s command to Abram to ‘go’, and he leaves all that was familiar to him – country, kindred and father’s house – and goes to a foreign place not even specified by God at that stage. God promises Abram to become a great nation, receive God’s blessing, become a great name, and become a source of blessing. God has commissioned Abram to make blessings possible for others and for himself. The location of his mission was not named, and Abram’s migration of journey was a pilgrimage of faith in God and for blessing.  Abram is meant to be a blessing to the people into whose land he will enter, as well as a blessing beyond there to all the families of the earth. Where on earth does Abram’s courage come from?  What on earth – how far did Abram, Sarah, and his brother’s son Lot walk – from Haran to Canaan at the age of 75?

As the map shows, Abram, Sarah, Lot and all their herds, livestock and so on.  I guess they must have walked at least 2494 kilometres, probably much more than that! When Abram and his family travelled through Canaan, they came to a place near Shechem and set up camp.  At that time, the land was already inhabited by the Canaanites.  God commanded Abram to move and live among a people who already had a claim upon the land.  Along the way, many would bless him, and a few would curse him, and digging a well to secure water would not be easy.  Each time they moved, they would have to set up camp, pack up, and repeat.

I am a first-generation immigrant, called by God to come to Australia. My children are second-generation immigrants and use English as their first language. What generation of immigrants are you?  Some of you are already third or fourth-generation migrants.  From the moment immigrants left their homes and relatives to settle in Australia, many challenges and difficulties must have been hard to describe.

It has been 235 years since Arthur Philip arrived on this land once inhabited by Aborigines. Australia is a ‘large continent but a small country’ founded by immigrants from all over the world and has many complex aspects that cannot be understood from just one perspective. One of those is the understanding of the Indigenous peoples of the land.  Just as Abram arrived and pitched his tent on land already peopled by the Canaanites, Australia, too, was inhabited by the First Nations Peoples.

A long time ago, the colonisers arrived and began taking over the land.  There were massacres in many places and much misunderstanding of the original inhabitants.  Some would go as far as calling it attempted genocide.  My country was also colonised by the Japanese who attempted genocide.  For more than 45 years we suffered from the colonisation of our culture, language and education.  With assimilation policies here in Australia, the Europeans also colonised the culture, language and education of the peoples and stole their future as well as their land.

The Tricky word “blessing”

A blessing given to some could be felt as a curse by others.  For example, the blessing of Jacob endorsed the cheating of Esau; and the homecoming for the prodigal son was painful for his brother, from whom ‘even a young goat’ was withheld.  Whether a blessing enriches or impoverishes depends on who evaluates the situation, and a blessing for one may not be delightful to others.

God did not call Abram to own his unnamed destination but to establish a mission of blessing.  The land of blessings was not the myth of ‘terra nullius’ – empty land or nobody’s land, the policy that justified the occupation of many native lands.  The call to the mission of blessing in Genesis 12:1-5 is that Abram is commanded not to rob the inhabitants of their wealth and blessings, but to be a platform through which all the families of the world can find blessings for themselves.

Desmond Tutu said, “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible, and we had the land.  They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible, and they had the land.” Arthur Corunna, an Aboriginal painter, said, “They brought religion. You have the commandment not to steal, but you stole this country. They took it away from innocent people.” This exposes the falsity of some of the religious ideals of the pioneers and the injustice of colonial history.  There were missionaries who did much good, and some who did much harm.  Sometimes they were well-intentioned but acted in ignorance.  Some tried to understand the culture, while others just tried to make the Aboriginal people into Europeans, as they did not distinguish between European culture and the Christian faith.  But there is no escaping the fact that the land was stolen.

The past week has been Reconciliation Week – reconciliation between the non-Aboriginal peoples and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  The word ‘Reconciliation’ sounds quite poetic and lovely, but when we apply it to the particular conflicts and struggles, it is very hard.  However, the God of mission commissions Abram to become a platform from which blessings come.  In today’s text, the greatness of the name and nation of Abram will lie in being a platform among other peoples and nations, not in exercising power and control over those peoples and their lands.  We seek to journey together in the true spirit of Christ to discover what it means to be a blessing to one another in love. As Jesus said, to ‘love one another as I have loved you’.  Amen.