Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Harran, they settled there. – Genesis 11:31

Today’s Scripture Reading (April 16, 2015): Genesis 11

There seems to be many misconceptions around the Santa Maria and Christopher Columbus’ voyage to find a new way to Asia. Maybe the most prevailing false image is that the ships were worked by criminals who were afraid that the Santa Maria was going fall off the edge of the earth. Or that maybe that even Columbus himself was unsure that the world wasn’t flat and that at one point the Santa Maria was going to fall off the edge of the map. The truth is that in 1492, while there might have been a few people within the Catholic Church who stubbornly clung to the idea of a flat earth, most of the world knew that the world was round. Most of the world had known that the world was round for almost two millennia – ever since Aristotle had suggested the idea in the fourth century B.C.E. Maybe the real miracle is not that the Santa Maria tried to sail west to get east, but rather that in the nineteen hundred years that passed since Aristotle and no one else had even tried.

But the reality was that no one really wanted to venture outside of their zone of comfort to make the trip west. Under the Pax Mongolica (the Mongolian Peace) there was a safe land passage that allowed all of Europe to get to the east. But all of that changed in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople. After 1453, the safe road east was gone. A new way to Asia had to be found, and maybe for the first time things in Europe were finally uncomfortable enough for someone to try to find the passage west – to get to the east.

Terah decides to move from Ur of the Chaldeans to Canaan. And so he packs up and moves his family toward Canaan – but he never actually gets there. He gets about half way, and then stops. No one is sure why Terah stopped in Haran, but the best guess is that he stopped because Haran was as far as he could go comfortably. This was as far as the empire went in his day. This was as far as he could go and still worship the idols of his family. The move to Canaan sounded good at the beginning of the move, but the farther he moved away from the center of his culture, the less comfortable he was. And in Haran, Terah reached the end of his comfort zone. And so it was in Haran that Terah settled.

It would be left to Abraham to complete the trip to Canaan. But that would not happen until after Terah had died. It would be God’s call on Abraham’s life that would eventually make it more comfortable to move on to Canaan rather than stay in Haran among the familiar things and the culture that had been so comfortable to his father. God’s call on our lives is often like that – it is the one thing that can really get us to move beyond our comfort zone.      

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Job 1