Title: More Than Isaac
Author: Christopher Harbin
Text: Genesis 17:1-8, 15-16
Human beings tend to be really good at protecting our own turf from others. We also tend to be good at taking someone else's turf for our own. We have difficulty sharing resources and seeing others as having the same rights we would claim for ourselves. We write ourselves as heroes in our history, almost never as villains. Meanwhile, there is no nation in the world whose history is much different, if at all. The world over, it is the same story. "We are the people who matter." "We are justified in what we have done." "No one else measures up to who we are." Even, "God is on our side." What happens when the Scriptures tell us that God's blessings reach further and are designed for more than our own?
I grew up on tales of marauding Viking ships. More recently, I learned that women from the British Isles favored Viking men over their own, because the Vikings bathed, and thus smelled better. My wife's family is descended from Sir Captain John Morgan, knighted and declared a Privateer on behalf of the British Empire. Others more likely called him a pirate. I heard stories of Brazil's history as the Bandeirantes took control of land far to the interior of the continent, claiming land for the Portuguese and Brazil itself. We did not talk about the way they slaughtered native peoples, including Jesuits working with indigenous peoples who were in the way and whose slaughter was approved by the Pope. We read the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures and see the Hebrew people being granted a land promised to them by Yahweh. We don't dwell too much on the fact that this land was already populated.
When we turn to today's text in Genesis, we find God's promise to Abraham would come down through Isaac. We take to that part of the text to justify most any actions taken by the descendants of Isaac to take control of the land promised to them. We rather gloss over o ...
Author: Christopher Harbin
Text: Genesis 17:1-8, 15-16
Human beings tend to be really good at protecting our own turf from others. We also tend to be good at taking someone else's turf for our own. We have difficulty sharing resources and seeing others as having the same rights we would claim for ourselves. We write ourselves as heroes in our history, almost never as villains. Meanwhile, there is no nation in the world whose history is much different, if at all. The world over, it is the same story. "We are the people who matter." "We are justified in what we have done." "No one else measures up to who we are." Even, "God is on our side." What happens when the Scriptures tell us that God's blessings reach further and are designed for more than our own?
I grew up on tales of marauding Viking ships. More recently, I learned that women from the British Isles favored Viking men over their own, because the Vikings bathed, and thus smelled better. My wife's family is descended from Sir Captain John Morgan, knighted and declared a Privateer on behalf of the British Empire. Others more likely called him a pirate. I heard stories of Brazil's history as the Bandeirantes took control of land far to the interior of the continent, claiming land for the Portuguese and Brazil itself. We did not talk about the way they slaughtered native peoples, including Jesuits working with indigenous peoples who were in the way and whose slaughter was approved by the Pope. We read the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures and see the Hebrew people being granted a land promised to them by Yahweh. We don't dwell too much on the fact that this land was already populated.
When we turn to today's text in Genesis, we find God's promise to Abraham would come down through Isaac. We take to that part of the text to justify most any actions taken by the descendants of Isaac to take control of the land promised to them. We rather gloss over o ...
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