Our biblical story for this week is Genesis 12:1-9. The epic Genesis story of God suddenly drops into the day to day reality of one man’s life. God chooses Abraham, and never really tells us why. God chooses Abraham and “invites” him on a great journey. There are times I’m up for a grand adventure, but in this story, if I were Abraham, I’m not so sure I would go.

Why in the world would I pack up my comfortable life on the word of a God I don’t know and have never met and wander the land for the rest of my life on the promise of a future I can’t possibly conceive of? 

It’s so hard to go, it’s so hard to move forward, to say yes to an unknown future and an unknown God. Would you stay or would you go? We will wrestle with your answers in worship and as our fall season of covenants and promises continues to unfold.

We Tell the Truth About Ourselves                                                                                  (At Friendship this is how we describe our time of Confession.)

Loving God, you have called us as your people,

but we don’t always want to be your pilgrim people,

called to be on the move,

from simple to complicated,

from safety to insecurity,

from comfortable to strange,

from what we know, to what we will never fully understand.

We don’t want to face where we fall short,

We don’t want to name the places,

we’ve dug in our heels and refused to be moved.

We don’t want to know the ways,

we keep the world from becoming safe and just for all of your children.

The journey from the homes we’ve made for ourselves

to a new home in you is not a journey we can make alone,

we need to know you are with us on the winding road, O God.

(551)