It’s almost impossible to overstate how big this moment was in human history. You can maybe even say it was the beginning of history per se. The day Abraham heard a voice that told him to go and he went, is the day life as a circle gave way to life as a line. The vicious cycle of nature gave way to an open-ended human drama, a story that was going somewhere.

About 4,000 years ago a childless nomad named Abram was living in the land of Haran, which today is somewhere in Turkey near the Syrian border. The family had migrated there from the Fertile Crescent town of Ur, near the southeastern Iraqi city of Nasariyah. No one knows why Abraham’s father took the family there, but after his death Abram heard a voice that broke into his experience and changed everything for him and for the world, including us today.

You see, before this time, no matter where you lived, you thought of life as one big wheel of life and death. Everything happened in a circle or a great spiral. If you looked up to the sky, you could see the sun and the moon in the arc across the heavens. If you looked at the earth, you could see the seasons changing with predictable regularity. If you looked to the womb, you could see the flow of life that happened in periodic cycles. If you looked at the families, you knew that as one person grew old and died, another was born to take his place.

Donald Hall captures some of this feeling in his poem “My Son, My Executioner.” In the final two stanzas he says to his son of his wife and him: We twenty-five and twenty-two,/Who seemed to live forever,/Observe enduring life in you/And start to die together./ I take into my arms the death/ Maturity exacts./And name with my imperfect breath/The mortal paradox.[1] It’s true, in a way, sad as it is; it’s the circle of life (think Lion King), and it is what it is.

But that way of looking at things led human beings into a kind of hopelessness about their futures. Thank God with Abraham’s call and answer, a new possibility entered the human imagination. If all you had to look forward to was what you had to look back to, then all you had it in your power to do was to accept the now and forever of the way things were. You could grin and bear it. You could shake your fist and fight it, but it would always be only that. No more.

As historian Thomas Cahill so eloquently puts in his book The Gifts of the Jews: “Out of the human race, which knows in its bones that all its striving must end in death, comes a leader who says he has been given an impossible promise. Out of moral imagination comes a dream of something new, something better, something yet to happen, something—in the future. … On every continent, in every society, [Abram] would been given the same advice …: do not journey but sit; compose yourself by the river of life, meditate on its ceaseless flow—on all that is past or passing or to come—until you have absorbed the pattern and have come to peace with the Great Wheel and with your own death and the death of all things in this corruptible sphere.”[2]

But Abraham did not heed those voices; he listened instead to the voice of the One who said Go, and he went. And in his going, in his leaving behind a world that he knew for a land he did not know, he was leaving behind also a life of safe certainty for a life of risky adventure. He was leaving behind the circle of life for the arrow of time. And we are all Abraham’s children who imagine now that our pasts do not determine our futures, that where we have come from is less important than where we are going, that what we do with our lives can be different from what our fathers and mothers did with theirs, and that there is a power at work in the world that can make all things new, if not all new things.

But who are Abraham’s children, after all? In one sense, maybe in the secular sense that Cahill points to, we are all Abraham’s children if we have come to think differently about the world and consider it open now to invention and innovation, open to change and newness, to being individuals and not just biological or sociological copies of our ancestors. But that’s not the limit of how we talk in church about the meaning of Abraham’s children.

When Abraham himself thought about it, he could think only in terms of physical offspring. When he received this call from God, he and his wife Sarah were about seventy-five years old, well past childbearing years. And yet God had promised him not only that he would inherit a land called Canaan, but that he would also be the father of many nations. And so he kept going into Sarah’s tent, having faith that somehow, some way he would be up to it, so to speak, and that somehow, some way, she might again know the flow of life within her. Almost as if to test his faith and sanity, it took another twenty-five years before they had the son of promise, Isaac. Twenty-five years! Think of it.

We know that during that time, Abraham and Sarah tried to help God more than God needed help. They connived to conceive a child with the slave girl Hagar. And the offspring of the flesh that was Ishmael has ever since created more complicated questions about who the children of Abraham are. Jews point always to the child of promise, Isaac. Muslims point to Ishmael as the one with firstborn rights. And Christians take our own turn in this, getting ourselves in there by virtue of our common virtue of faith in God’s promises.

St. Paul makes the bold claim in Romans that “Abraham is the father of us all.” I am not exactly sure whether by “us all” Paul had in mind all of us Jews and Gentiles or all humanity, but I want to say that I think that in the end, we have to say that all really means all. You see, the problem of carving up who’s in and who’s out is partly the problem God is trying to solve with this call to Abraham and the promises of life and blessing he offers through him. Before this time people organized themselves in family clans, in small societies that had rituals and traditions that kept them safe from outsiders and made them feel that they belonged in the world. But with the call of Abraham, a new way of looking at life began.

By answering the call of God, Abraham moved beyond the basic fears of all human beings, three of which are: ignorance, inclusion, and impotence. Instead of lamenting his ignorance and the loss of control, he embarked upon a journey into the unknown. Instead of fearing inclusion of the stranger and the outsider, he bore God’s promise of universal blessings for the whole earth. In the face of his own impotence, he believed that God could do the impossible.[3] In these ways, Abraham became the father of us all.

And so today, if you have the capacity wonder whether God has anything for you to do with your life that is more than sitting back and trying to make it through by adjusting your attitude and entertaining yourself until you die, you might be a child of Abraham. If you sense that God wants to make something of your life, and even though you don’t know what you are saying yes to when you say yes to that voice within you, you might be a child of Abraham. If you resist the urge to make enemies out of neighbors and instead do all you can to make friends out of strangers, you might be a child of Abraham. And if you believe that your call in life is not just to benefit yourself by taking your inheritance for your own life of luxury but using it instead to bless others, then you might be a child of Abraham.

You might have read in the paper this week about the lawsuit being waged over the estate of the late famous and infamous oilman H. L. Hunt. Things are a bit complicated and always have been since Father Hunt (somewhat like Father Abraham) decided to have three families instead of one. They haven’t turned out forever jockeying with one another like Jews, Christians, and Muslims that come from Father Abraham. But with the passing of Margaret Hunt Hill, who kept the family together, one great-grandson is suing the family trusts to get a bigger share of the fortune to support a lavish lifestyle, as his father describes it. And so it begins.

Whatever the actual merits of this case, it points us spiritually to how we have to balance our sense of being privileged heirs of Abraham with the responsibility that goes with it. When we fight spiritually over who is the worthiest to receive their share of the inheritance or the honored place in the family of faith, we miss the whole point of what God was up to. We are meant to claim our rights as children of Abraham, not so that we can distinguish ourselves from others by claiming they have no rights or less rights than we, and thus less of an inheritance. Being children of Abraham is first about knowing that that we are children of God even more so than we are children of Abraham. But if we are children of God by being children of Abraham, then we should take up his task of being a channel through which God will bless the world. Christians ought to be more concerned with how we show the world God’s love than with how we prove to the world that we are more loved than they.

The other night at Temple Emanu-El, a Christian woman who came to hear the dialogue I had with Rabbi Stern approached me and asked if I were a born-again Christian. I told her I hope so. I guess I had a little devil in me, don’t you know?! Well, that didn’t satisfy her. She pressed me to say whether I was or was not. I asked her why that was so important to her, that she had just heard me speak about Jesus being my Savior and Lord. I told her it felt like she was trying to decide if I were in or out of the family of God. She didn’t seem to understand my reticence to play that game.

But the point I want to make is that while I hope that everyone within the sound of my voice today will confess that Jesus is Lord, when we get preoccupied with sorting out who are the children of Abraham and who are not, instead of leaving that up to God, we are liable to forget that we must be about our Father’s business. And Father Abraham’s business is our Father in heaven’s business—that is, that we use our every breath and every bone to be a blessing to the world.

When you go on a mission trip in order to make the Word become flesh again to those who do not know Christ, you are a child of Abraham. When you let go your grip on money and offer it to God for acts of mercy in the world, you are a child of Abraham. When you extend grace and forgiveness to someone who has hurt you, you are a child of Abraham. When you teach your children to obey the call of God and risk themselves in the world for Christ’s sake, you are a child of Abraham. When you refuse to concede to the sands of time or claim that you are too old for anything new and world-changing to come from you, you are a child of Abraham.

God will bless your efforts in life when your efforts in life are aimed at blessing the world. So much is possible—more than you can ever imagine. Because the living God is loose in the world and wants to bless the world through you. Will you claim your identity as a child of Abraham through your faith in Jesus Christ and live to bless the world in his name? There is no greater calling.

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