Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Luke 13:31-35 - a sermon preached for LTS Chapel
“On that day Adonai (the LORD) made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.””
In 1984, biblical scholar Phyllis Trible introduced us to “Texts of Terror,” stories of abuse of women in the Bible that, because of their place in the Bible, were used to support the continued abused of women in communities that consider the Bible an authoritative text: the rape of Dinah, Amnon’s rape of his sister, Tamar, the fatal rape of the Levite’s concubine at the end of the book of Judges. Trible exposed the ways these stories terrorized their women listeners.
I would like to suggest this morning that what we have here in Genesis is a different kind of text of terror, one that has been used, along with texts from Exodus and Joshua, to support the colonization of lands in Canada and internationally, and to displace Indigenous peoples. It has been heard with terror as it has been used to foster colonial attitudes toward the land that have done violence to the non-human inhabitants of the land, not just the human ones. Christans in particular have used these texts to argue that God has given land to us, as spiritual inheritors of Abraham, and that God intends for us to take control of that land. Christians, working together with colonial powers, have used these texts to argue that God has given this land to us, to us Christians, to control and use. This is one of the theo/logics behind the ideas of manifest destiny, the Doctrine of Discovery, terra nullius, the exploitation of the environment and its resources, and the tangled mess we find ourselves in today.
But notice the conflation in this theo/logic of what are actually three separate ideas. The gift of the land itself, that the gift is to us alone, and that the gift bestows not just the land, but control of it and its inhabitants. In this text, leaving the stories from Exodus and Joshua to the side, this conflation is imposed. It is not inherently there. This passage can, in fact, be read as an anti-colonial text, an anti-ownership approach in which God gives us land to live with, rather than on, in which land becomes a gift for all, not just some.
Shai Held, a Jewish scholar and rabbi, helps us to see this when he points out that this promise of the land and descendants to Abram is immediately followed in Genesis by the story of Sarai and Hagar, wherein Sarai takes her Eyptian slave-girl Hagar and forces her to be a procreational surrogate, and then “deals harshly” with her. Held points out that the word for “deals harshly” is the same word God uses to describe the oppression that Abram’s descendants will experience in the land that is not theirs, and he goes on to note that God does not support Sarai’s behaviour. Rather, the angel of the LORD makes a promise to Hagar, similar to the promise to Abram, that Hagar will be the mother of multitudes.
Held sees a connection between these two stories, not just a sequential relating of events. For Held, Sarai’s treatment of Hagar, told immediately following the gift of land to Abram’s descendants, is meant to be a caution. Abram’s descendants are not to treat those they encounter they way they would be treated by the Egyptians (the grammatical tense gets a bit muddled here because Genesis was written after slavery in Egypt but tells of the time before.) Abram’s descendants are not to “deal harshly” with the non-Hebrews in their midst. They are not to oppress others the way they would be oppressed. More to the point, for Held, they are not to enslave or oppress the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites, onto whose land God has directed them.
This idea that one group of people can live on the same land as other groups without one becoming dominant over the other is not unusual. Indigenous peoples here have done it for centuries. In the time of Abram, “nomadic-sedentary symbiosis,” as Lawson Younger, a biblical scholar specializing in the Hebrew and Ancient Near Eastern history, describes it, was a reality. Multiple peoples shared the lands of the Ancient Near East, including the land of Haran, where Abram was before he came to Canaan. Some were nomadic and some lived in more settled habitats, but they lived in patterns and systems that were mutually beneficial to one another.
And so when God says to Abram, I give your descendants this land, the land of all these other peoples, there is no indication in this text that God is saying, I give this land to you alone, to subdue it, to eliminate the other peoples here. That may occur in other places in the Bible, but it is not here.
What is here is that God makes a gift of God’s land to one people among many, within the parameters of God’s covenant, as Walter Brueggemann emphasizes. Which means that this gift of land becomes truly a gift, which is to say a gift for all and not just some, when it is understood as a gift to live with, rather than a gift to live on.
This is a message of Good News that we hear when we pay attention to Indigenous perspectives on this text. Indigenous peoples understand land as something to live with, not on. Land is full of others with whom we live in relation, human and non-human. The Creator calls us to live in mutual life-giving with one another, not conquering or controlling one another, but offering our gifts to them and receiving their gifts in return. The people, the plants and animals, the rocks and rivers, they are all part of this web of relationality that is meant to provide life for all.
And so when we hear these words from Genesis with this deeper understanding, we hear God’s covenant with Abram and with Abram’s descendants promise that God will ensure that they––us––will always find a place to live where God brings us into relationship with other communities and helps us to find our place. This is not a promise about territorialism, or nationalism, or statehood. This is a promise about God gifting us with relationship with all, about being given our place as the one amongst the many for abundant reward and blessing.
We know that God yearns for this mutual relationship with others on the land, and not for us to subdue them, in part because of Jesus’ words in our Gospel reading, that he longs to gather the people under his wings as a mother hen gathers her chicks. As he witnesses the deaths visited by people upon one another, “Jerusalem” on the prophets, the eagle of Rome on the people of Jerusalem, he cries out and laments. This is not the way people are supposed to live. This is not how God’s gift is meant to be received.
Rather, I would like to suggest that God’s gifts are meant to be received with reciprocal giving. That is, that when God gives us something, we are to give of ourselves in return. Now I realize this sounds like a kind of conditional giving, and very un-Lutheran, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that when God gives us something, we give of ourselves to that gift. In other words, when God gives us land, we give of ourselves to the land. More specifically, to the land and all of its inhabitants, human and non-human.
This is, actually, what we see Jesus doing. Jesus understands himself as one of the children of Israel, a descendant of Abram, a recipient of the land. And he gives of himself to the land and the people. He lives with the land, rather than on the land. He gives of himself to the children of Israel, and to the Hittites and the Jebusites of his time––to the Samaritans, the Syro-pheonicians, the Romans. He lives with the land and its inhabitants, not on or over them.
We, who follow Christ, are called to do the same. We are called to be the reason that others say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD.” This land we live on, across all these provinces and territories, this land is a gift to us. But not to us alone. And not for us to live on. This land is a gift for us to live with, along with all the other humans and non-humans to whom God has also given this land as a gift. And we are called to follow Christ in making of ourselves and our descendants a gift to this land and to its humans and non-human inhabitants. We are called to give of ourselves in such a way that those who have lived on the land since before we arrived, and continue to live here still, might join us in the words of the Psalm, “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.”
In a few minutes we will celebrate Holy Communion, the gift of Christ to us. We will each do it from our own land, with the fruits of the land. The prayer that Jesus prayed during his last Passover celebration with his disciples would have included the Hebrew blessing, Baruch ‘atah Adonai, melech ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min haaretz. Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth. And then, Baruch ‘atah Adonai, melech ha’olam, borei pri hagafen. Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth fruit from the vine. Jesus knew his connection to the land, and then he went on to give himself to others on the land, by making a gift of himself, “This bread that has been given to me is also my body given for you.This fruit of the vine that has been given to me is also my blood given for you.” Weaving together the gift of the land and the gift of himself, he brings us into a sacred relationship with the land, with its inhabitants, and with one another. And so as we, some of those descendants of Abram, receive the gift of land and of Christ, we give thanks that we are strengthened to give of ourselves in return and to be abundance for all our relations as Christ is abundance for us. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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