“Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?” It is hard to be a neighbor. Jesus and Mr. Rogers made it look easy, but for all of us who are not the Son of God, or do not look as good in a cardigan, this neighbor thing, this getting along and living with one another is not all it is cut out to be. If you look at Jesus and Mr. Rogers, any ease of being we attribute to them, likely misses the intentionality of them making their lives pliable to God’s will. So, this act of being neighbors, of being Christians, is going to take a lot of effort on our part, more than a dash of grace, because in making ourselves pliable to God’s will, to having the Kingdom come, we are going to need to consider what we do when we fall short.
If we look past Abram the patriarch, the founder of the Abrahamic religions, the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we find a person. Today, we witness that person, this man Abram, fleeing famine and fearing for his life. “What do you do with the fear that you feel?” Although Abram has just been promised protection and love from God, for generation after generation, we witness Abram’s fear of the world become greater than his fear of God. “What do you do with the fear that you feel?” We witness Abram casting judgement on Pharoah, assuming pharaoh wishes him harm.
Abram encountered his neighbor and believed he knew him. “What do you do with the fear that you feel?” This is the fracture point where paths diverge. Abram approached Egypt and played it safe. We do not know whether this threat to Abram’s life was real or perceived. “What do you do with the fear that you feel?” Whether there was a real or imagined threat is not relevant, because the fact of the matter is Abram felt threatened, and responded in turn. This decision begins and ends with Abram. Do we see Abram consult God? Does he ask Sarah for her opinion? Does he ask any of the local Egyptians or Pharoah himself whether he is safe? No. Abram’s decision begins and ends with Abram. But that’s the tricky part. Abram made this decision by himself, for himself…but this decision affected everyone. “What do you do with the fear that you feel?”
“I like to choose my neighbors. We are all the same. I won’t go to you, but you’ll come me, because that’s the neighbor game.” Before we cast judgement on Abram, we must ask ourselves, are we any different? Do we wait for people to come in and prove they can be our neighbors? Do we stay in what is familiar, what is safe? Abram went to someone else’s neighborhood and judged them before he took a moment to know them? Are we any different? Is it the end of the world, the end of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam if we find that Abram sinned? Are we pulling a prophet off a pedestal to be more faithful to God, or is this an endeavor to satisfy our own egos, or to soothe religious trauma, to bring everyone down with us? “What do you do with the fear that you feel?” Are we capable of following imperfect prophets? “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” If we cannot have imperfect prophets, then we might be in a bit of a bind.
Whether we like it or not, we need Abram, because no one has had faith greater than his. If we are to cast stones, then we must know our faith is greater than Abram’s, and that is not possible. But if we can have imperfect prophets, then we can go forward, and in doing so we might glean some of that faith that can move mountains. I believe we can go forward, that we can have imperfect prophets, in fact, we should have imperfect prophets. Because when it comes down to it…Abram sinned. Abram doubted.
In the first true trial of his faith, a test after being promised protection and prosperity, Abram chose the world he knew, over the world God promised. This could have been the end of everything. Without God’s intervention, Abram would have avoided a perceived threat from Pharoah, but in doing so he would have lost everything of real value. He would have saved his own life, but he would have lost Sarah, and he could have lost those generations of promises. “What do you do with the fear that you feel?” If this was a world of humans, this would have been the end. Abram chose the safety he knew and was rewarded with the world he already had. But God is not content with the world we create, with the manifestations of our fear. When Abram fell short, God showed up. Pharoah and his people are afflicted with plagues. Although Pharaoh did nothing wrong, he realizes something is up and goes to the source. After Abram had stolen Pharoah’s agency, Pharoah shows up and offers a contrast to this man of God.
“Maybe I shouldn’t choose my neighbors. Maybe they all should not be like me. But I don’t know where, to go, oh where could my neighbor be.” Pharoah confronts Abram with the consequences of his cowardice. This confrontation merits consideration. The Interpreter’s Bible uses a snippet from Frederick W. Robertson’s work, Notes on Genesis, noting, “The man of God was rebuked by the man of the world: a thing singularly humiliating. It is common to find men of the world whose honor and integrity is a shame to every Christian; and common enough to find men of religious feeling and aspiration, of whom that same world is compelled to say that whenever they are tried in business there is always a something found wanting…Morality is not religion; but unless religions are grafted on morality, religion is worth nothing.”
Pharoah, this man who Abram had assumed was ungodly, showed the fear of God and the morality that Abram lacked in this moment of cowardice. Yet, this is the only moment that focuses on this Pharoah. The story of Abram continues and this interaction is left as a footnote in our faith. This is not the last time Abram’s faith will fail. We know he passes Sarah off as his sister in Genesis 20:1-18, and, like father like son, Issac does the same with Rebekah in Genesis 26:1-11. We can be left asking, where is the vaunted faith of these men? But where was it said that their faith was perfect? Where is it said that these people were perfect?
If you will humor me, I hope you will remember today is a journey through the Hebrew Bible. A text very much alive in our faith and in the faith of our Jewish brothers and sisters. Faiths which have one crucial difference. When we read this text, we might unconsciously project our knowledge of Christ, our attachment to divine infallibility, a theological tripwire, which raises the stakes and magnifies blunders by prophets and disciples. I worry about driving a point too far, but the stakes are too high. As Christians we emulate Christ, but in our imperfection, in the flaws and the sin that is bound to define us, the very reasons for our longing for grace, for the miracle of Christ’s resurrection, we might forget that, for us mere humans, failure is the expectation, is the default result, without God in the equation. Today we witnessed the result of Abram reacting to the world he knew. But we remember Abram for casting that world aside and moving towards that which God promised.
“I want to be your neighbor. I want to know you too. And though you seem strange, I’ll try to change, because that’s what Christ asks me to do.” Judgement is a dead end that ignores the reality that exists after decisions have been made and the seats have cleared. We can render judgement, can decide who is or is not our neighbor, but we cannot escape the ripples that emanate from our decisions. It is right to look at Abram and remember he is a person. If we make the mistake of elevating him to the level of an idol, of worshipping him, forgetting he is not God, we lose sight of the reason we are drawn to Abram.
Abram made mistakes, but the strength of his faith was enough to build three religions on. God saw Abram and knew him completely and chose him anyways. Forgiving does not mean forgetting. We do not just move on when mistakes are made. These ripples move out and touch and shape the experiences of everyone. That is why we define sin as anything that draws us away from God, as societal damage. God is always with us, but if we do not recognize the harm that is around us, do not come to terms with the wounds we inflict on others, as well the wounds we receive, we will constantly scramble for a false safety that is only of this world. Like Abram we will be rewarded with the world we knew.
You know this safety. It is a world where more and more powers have nuclear bombs, simply because the other power does. This is a world of tariffs, taxes, manipulation, and coercion that lets the suffering of another person of country be viewed as beneficial, because “it’s not happening to me.” How many of us have been afraid of Pharaoh, of the “other,” that we have been stuck in responding to enemies before we bother to know them as foe or friend? “What do you do with the fear that you feel?” Every week we are reminded we are made in God’s image, that we are children of God and that God’s creation is good. But when we leave these doors, do we know our neighbors, or do we choose our neighbors? Where are those you disagree with? Where are those who do not look like you, who do not think like you, who are a stranger in every way except for the matter of their being?
Like Abram, we are being asked to leave behind the world we know, the world we have been used to responding to, because God calls us to a promised land that is not the one we have made. We will make our home among those we would call enemies, among those who would deny us, and we will know them as friends because God’s possibilities are greater than our limitations. “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” “What do you do with the fear that you feel?” These are the questions that guided you through this day, but the question I will leave you with, the question you must pray on is, “Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?”
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