First Sunday after Trinity
READING: Genesis 12: 1-9
Going on a Journey
I wonder if you have ever watched programmes like Race Across the World and found yourself thinking: I could never do that — or perhaps secretly imagining that you might- or wondering who you might choose as your travel companion ?
Part of the fascination of those journeys is not simply the travelling itself, but the uncertainty. Contestants leave behind familiar routines, limited in what they can carry, often without knowing exactly where they will sleep, how they will get there, or what they will discover along the way. Plans change. Weather shifts. People disappoint them or unexpectedly help them. The journey transforms them.
Perhaps that is why these programmes resonate so deeply and are so popular. Beneath all the trains, maps, and border crossings lies something profoundly human: we are all travelling through life without complete certainty.
And that is where today’s reading from Genesis begins.
Abram is seventy-five years old when God says to him:
“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”
Notice what God does not say. There is no detailed itinerary. No five-year plan. No guarantee that the journey will be easy. Abram is simply asked to go.
It is an extraordinary act of trust.
Most of us spend much of our lives trying to create stability and predictability. We like to know where we are heading. We want outcomes, timelines, security. Yet biblical faith so often begins not with certainty, but with movement.
Abram leaves before he fully understands.
Perhaps that is one of the hardest spiritual lessons to learn: that faith is not about possessing the future, but trusting God enough to take the next step.
Christian writer Richard Rohr often describes this kind of experience as entering “liminal space” — that uncomfortable place between what was and what will be. It is the place where old certainties fall away and transformation becomes possible. Abram leaves behind tribe, status, familiarity, and inherited identity. He becomes vulnerable, unsettled, dependent.
And perhaps many of us today know something of that feeling in so many ways.
People navigating grief after losing someone they love.
Journeying into the unknown when facing illness or ageing…
Families uprooted by war or climate change : migrants on the move.
Young people uncertain about work, housing, or the future of the planet.
Churches wondering what faithful witness looks like in changing times.
So much of modern life feels fragile and transitional.
Yet in the book of Genesis something important is suggested : God is encountered not only in settled places, but on the journey itself.
Again and again Abram pauses and builds altars.
Let’s look at that detail for a moment.
Abram on his journey into the unknown erects tents as a means of shelter , yet he chooses to worship by building an altar.
The tent speaks of movement, vulnerability, impermanence. Tents can be folded away overnight. They are temporary. But the altars represent something deeper: moments of remembrance, gratitude, encounter, and worship.
Abram does not wait until he has arrived safely before praying. Worship happens on the journey and in the uncertainty.
That may be one of the most important lessons in this reading for our own age.
Modern life often feels like constant motion — endless news, endless productivity, endless information, endless anxiety about what comes next. We move quickly from one thing to another and can slowly lose the ability to stop and notice where God has already met us.
But remember , Abram interrupts his journey with worship.
Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury once wrote that prayer is partly about learning to inhabit reality truthfully before God. And the reality of people on a journey is that of not knowing and uncertainty.
When Abram stopped to pray, to build those altars , he does not control the landscape around him. He does not possess the land. The promise of God to him is not yet fulfilled. Abram walks through uncertainty, incompleteness, and tension.
And still he builds altars.
Perhaps worship is precisely this: stopping long enough to recognise that God is present before we fully understand where we are going.
Many of us today live almost permanently in “tent mode” — economically uncertain, emotionally stretched, socially fragmented, unsure what the future holds. Yet Genesis reminds us that the people of God have always been pilgrims.
In Abram’s story we notice that it is not about his triumphal arrival in a new land . It is about learning how to travel faithfully.
And importantly, Abram is not blessed by God simply for himself.
God says: “I will bless you … so that you will be a blessing.”
That changes everything. Being blessed so that we in turn can be a blessing to others
Our faith, our relationship with God, is never merely private spirituality. Abram’s calling immediately becomes connected to the healing of the world. The blessing is meant to flow outward into the whole world
Pope Leo XIV has spoken repeatedly about humanity becoming trapped in new forms of Babel — systems built on control, domination, profit, technological power, and fear. In Babel, humanity tried to “make a name” for itself. But here in Genesis, God tells Abram:
“I will make your name great.” ….True greatness does not come through self-exaltation. It comes through relationship with God and openness to others.
Abram’s pilgrimage becomes a journey away from possession and toward dependence; away from isolation and toward communion.
And perhaps that remains the Church’s calling too…..and each one of us as part of the Church.
To become a pilgrim people.
To travel lightly.
To carry blessing into the world.
To resist becoming obsessed with control, success, or certainty.
To remember that worship matters more than achievement.
There is something deeply moving about the final line of this passage we heard today :
“Abram journeyed on by stages…”
Not by sudden perfection.
Not by instant clarity or vision
Not by triumph.
By stages.
That may be one of the most truthful descriptions of spiritual life in the whole Bible.
We grow by stages.
We heal by stages.
We trust by stages.
We become compassionate by stages.
We learn to surrender by stages.
And perhaps mature faith is not finally about arriving at certainty, but learning to keep travelling prayerfully, attentively, and hopefully with God.
Maybe the real danger in modern life is not simply that we are moving too fast, but that we are journeying without altars….without making spaces to encounter God with us in the world though deep prayer.
Genesis reminds us that the pilgrim people of God are called to pause, worship, remember, and give thanks even while the road ahead remains uncertain.
Because sometimes the holiest thing we can do is simply continue the journey — by stages and to build in those opportunities to encounter God through prayer
Perhaps that is why programmes like Race Across the World touch something so deep within us. Beneath the competition, the missed trains, the exhaustion, and the unfamiliar landscapes, we glimpse something true about being human. The journey changes people. Strangers become companions. Confidence gives way to vulnerability. Carefully made plans unravel, yet moments of kindness, beauty, and unexpected grace emerge along the way. Rarely do contestants finish the journey as the same people who began it. And perhaps faith is something like that too. We travel without possessing the map in full. We carry tents more often than certainties. Yet along the road, if we are attentive enough to pause and build altars, we slowly discover that God has been travelling with us all along — shaping us, blessing us, and teaching us, by stages, how to become a blessing to others.
Image: Sebastian Herrmann (Unsplash.com)
