Monday, June 23, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Scene Three
Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk
and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.
This pilgrimage in the book of Genesis wasn’t like most of our vacations. No cars, no tickets, no maps, no plans. God just woke Abram up and told him to get on the road. He took a minute to get his family together, and his animals, and they were off.
Abram went as the LORD directed him, and Lot went with him.
Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran.
Abram took his wife, Sarai, his brother’s son Lot,
all the possessions that they had accumulated,
and the persons they had acquired in Haran,
and they set out for the land of
Canaan.
N. T. Wright pictures this as the beginning  of Scene Three in God’s play. Scene One: Creation. Then the Fall … and now Abram begins the saga of what Peter called, “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession … once we were not a people, but now we are the people of God.” The story begins with a journey and continues through time and space along highways large and small, an ongoing trek for all of God’s children.
When I set out in a canoe down Sugar Creek, I never wanted the trip to end; what would I find around the bend?
Two drifters
Off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world
To see
We’re after the same
Rainbow’s end
Waitin’ round the bend
My huckleberry friend
Moon River …
I still love traveling, with or without a destination. There’s such a lot of world to see. The adventure God sent Abram on continues through the centuries. In Scene Four of God’s play (according to Wright),  Jesus and his disciples walked every day down the dusty roads of Galilee, village to village, miracle to miracle, parable to parable. Jesus brought Abram’s Jehovah to life for the Jewish village people, who had long ago forgotten they were chosen as soldiers and kings climbed over them and powered their way to the top. Jesus’ journey seemed to end with his struggle carrying the cross and crucifixion on Calvary, but of course we know better.
Wright describes Scene Five in God’s play as the journey of The Church. We spent a few hours yesterday with Gary and Leah Johnson, our pastors forty years ago when several families teamed up to rebuild a broken church in Waynesville, Illinois. Since then the Johnsons have explored roads of all kinds through God’s country, geographically through all fifty states and several continents with their family, spiritually reconstructing another broken church in Indianapolis and now educating and empowering church elders in hundreds of churches around the world.
I will make of you a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
so that you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you
and curse those who curse you.
All the communities of the earth
shall find blessing in you.
In Waynesville Gary, the church secretary Cheryle, and I met every day in Grandma Helen’s living room to pray with each other and pray for our friends and families in the church. This rich life of prayer produced sweet and tender fruit, and none of us will forget our three plus years at Waynesville Christian Church. Yesterday in their dining room it seemed simple to start where we left off years ago, with memories and dreams we shared then and now.
And we can’t wait to get on the road again.
(Genesis 12, Psalm 33, Hebrews 4, Matthew 7)
(posted at davesandel.net)
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