September 20, 2026

Indianola Presbyterian Church

“The Long Faithfulness”
Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch

September 20, 2026                                                                                                                                        Based on Genesis 12:1-9

We are a country of immigrants, and because of that most of us have some version of our ancestor’s origin story, how they came here, and where the came from. Most of us have some version of our family’s origin story. A leaving story. Somebody at some point got on a boat. Somebody packed a car. Somebody walked away from a farm that had stopped producing, or a town that had stopped making sense, or a country that had become dangerous. Maybe you know all the details. Maybe all that survived is a last name and a vague sense of the country it came from. But somebody, at some point in your ancestry, made the choice to leave. And because they left, you’re here. That’s where our story starts this morning. With somebody leaving. Someone leaving their old life behind and trusting God to begin anew.

We are beginning a new worship series called The Long Faithfulness, about the promises God makes and the strange, winding ways those promises move through generations. And though this is the beginning of Abram’s story, it is not the beginning of the biblical Narrative. This is chapter twelve of Genesis. Eleven chapters have already happened. And so far, things have not gone particularly well between humanity and God… Here’s a quick abbreviated summary of those first eleven chapters. God creates a world and calls it good, and God creates Humanity and places them in a garden but they immediately find a way to make a mess of things, so God kicks them out. They have children, two brothers… but then one kills the other and Violence starts to spread over the earth. So a flood comes in an attempt to start over, and afterward God promises never again to destroy the earth that way. Then at Babel, humanity in their hubris tries to make itself powerful enough that it will never have to depend upon God or anyone else, but their tower crumbles. And God scatters them. 

Eleven chapters. And the pattern is hard to miss. God provides. But then Humans overreach. Humans hurt one another. Humans try to make themselves secure by making themselves powerful. And again and again, the story turns toward judgment, exile, destruction, and scattering. This is how God first tries to deal with creation. And then we get to chapter twelve. And suddenly, the story slows down. God does something different. Rather than trying to handle humanity en masse… God chooses one person. Abram. 

We will come to know him by the name he will eventually receive: Abraham. But for now, he is Abram. He is seventy-five years old when God says: “Leave your land, your extended family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you.” Notice what is missing. There is no address. No map. No timeline. No five-year plan. Abram is simply told to go, and he will find out where later.

At seventy-five years old, God asks him to walk away from almost every form of security the ancient world could offer. His tribe, his people. His home. His father’s household. His inheritance. His sense of where he belongs. And Abram goes. And with him his wife Sarai, who we will come to know as later as Sarah And his nephew, and his entire household. God calls these particular people and promises them that their lives will be blessed. 
and they all uproot their lives and step forward into an unknown future. And this is where Abram becomes so important to the biblical story. This is where Abram becomes the father of faith… Because all of the so called “Abrahamic faiths” trace our spiritual ancestry back to this story…

Jews trace their ancestry to Abram through Isaac and Sarai. Muslims know him as Ibrahim, a prophet and friend of God, and trace their ancestry back to him through Ishmael and Hagar. And Christians claim Abram as a spiritual ancestor through faith. Three great religious traditions, with their own distinct beliefs and histories and understandings of God, all look back to this same figure and say:

This is part of where our story begins. Abram is our ancestor. And for us descendants, that means something important. We are not simply people who admire Abram from a distance. Through faith, we are his descendants. And if we are his descendants, then his calling, his covenant, is part of our inheritance too.

So what exactly was Abram called to do?

God says: “I will bless you” okay, that is an excellent inheritance to have.. But that’s not all God says.
God says “I will bless you… so that… You will be a blessing.” “So that All the families on earth will be blessed because of you.” Three movements. I will bless you So that You will be a blessing. So that All the families of the earth will be blessed because of you.

The blessing is never meant to stop with Abram. That is the beginning of this story. God chooses Abram, not because Abram is better than everyone else. Not because he has earned it. Not because God wants Abram to have a more comfortable life. God chooses Abram because God intends to bless the world through him.

Abram is blessed for the sake of blessing others. He is a conduit, not a container.The blessing is supposed to move.

And I think that is what covenant means at its heart. We sometimes hear the word covenant in faith.
I often talk about it with couples in premarital counciling. And I introduce the idea by explaining it like a legal contract. One party agrees to do this, and the other party will do that. But covenant in the bible and in our faith is deeper than a contractual obligation. God says, essentially: I am choosing you. I am binding myself to you. I am committing myself to this relationship for the long haul. And then God gives that relationship a purpose.

Through you, blessing will reach the world. God looks at a fractured humanity and does not give up on humanity. God begins again. Not with a weapon. Not with a flood. Not with a punishment. With a promise. God says: I am going to make something new. I am going to create a people and I am going to bless them. And through them, I am going to bless the world. That is covenant. And that changes how we understand what it means to be chosen by God.

Being chosen is not about being chosen instead of everyone else. It is about being chosen for everyone else. And that is a message we have sometimes forgotten. Because Abram's descendants have not always been a blessing. People of faith have often taken the blessing and forgotten the purpose. We have turned vocation into status. We have treated God's love as something to possess rather than something to share.

And Christians, in particular, have sometimes used the language of being God's chosen people to justify things that look very little like blessing. Faith has been invoked to justify conquest and the taking of land. It has been used to fuel antisemitism, and islamophobia and persecution. It has been woven into colonialism, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. And  It has been used to defend slavery, segregation, and the sin of white supremacy. These are not the fruits of the blessing God describes to Abram. They are what happens when we hear “I will bless you” and forget the words that come immediately afterward: “So that you will be a blessing.” And I don't say that to make us feel guilty. Guilt is a poor motivator.

I say it because Abram's calling is our inheritance. If we claim Abram as our ancestor through faith, then we inherit not only the promise. We inherit the purpose.

We are blessed for the sake of blessing others. So the question we are left with… Who is supposed to be blessed because we are here? If the end goal is that all of the families of earth will be blessed by us then… Who today should experiences a little more welcome because we are here? Who finds a little more hope because we are here? Who feels less alone because we are here? Who is fed, encouraged, forgiven, included, protected, or loved because God's blessing has passed through our hands? And we may never know the full answer.

Because Abram didn't either. Abram doesn't get the whole map. He gets a promise from God… And then he gets a road laid out before him to walk. We too want a map to make the way clear. We want to know how the story ends. We want to know whether the decision we are making today will work. Whether our children will be okay.

Whether our church will still be here twenty years from now. Whether the work we are doing will make a difference. Whether the long arc of history will actually bend toward justice.

But Abram doesn't get to know any of that. Neither do we Instead we, like Abram, are called to trust God, and live in faith. Perhaps faith is not knowing. Perhaps faith is trusting enough to take the next step anyway.

And that is why I think this series is called The Long Faithfulness. Because Abram never sees the whole promise fulfilled. He never sees all the families of the earth blessed because of him and his descendants. He never sees the great nation of people God promises to build through him. But He walks on in faith. He builds an altar.

He keeps going and going until his life is ended. The promise is still unfinished. And yet God has been faithful.

That is the long faithfulness. Not a promise fulfilled in one lifetime. A promise carried forward by generations of imperfect people who often cannot see what their faithfulness will become. And somehow, through all of it, God remains faithful. The promise keeps moving. The blessing keeps traveling. And Christians believe that eventually this promise eventually takes on flesh in Jesus, who shows us what God's blessing looks like when it moves through a human life. A life poured outward. A life of welcome. A life of healing. A life that keeps making room. And so we begin this long story with Abram and Sarai. An old couple. A household. A promise. And a road they cannot yet see the end of. And maybe that is where we are too. We don't know the future. We don't know what our faithfulness will become. We don't know which small act of love will matter more than we realize.

But we can take the next faithful step. We can remember who we are. We can remember whose we are. And we can remember the calling we have inherited.

We are Abram's descendants through faith. We have received the blessing. And we have received the call.

So the question before us is simple: Who is God's blessing supposed to move through us to reach? Because somebody once left so that you could be here. Somebody trusted a road they could not see. Somebody carried a promise they would never live long enough to see fulfilled. And now that promise has made its way to us… to you and to me.. God’s blessing has reached us. And the question is whether we will let it stop here. Or whether we will keep walking. Keep trusting. Keep building.  Keep becoming a blessing. Because that is the promise God made to Abram. It is our inheritance. And it is still moving.

Amen.

‍ ‍WE GATHER IN AWE AND PRAISE                                                              

PRELUDE                                                                          “Morning Has Broken”                                                       arr. Lisa Hoekstra 

INTROIT                                     "Make a Joyful Noise"                                     Karle Erikson

WELCOME                                                                    Rev. Trip Porch

One: This is the day that the Lord has made

All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

*CALL TO WORSHIP   by Rev. Daniel B. Randall

One:  We are met in the presence of God

All:    And we do not meet alone.

One:  With the angels in the highest heaven

All:   We gather to worship the Lord.

One:  With Abraham and Sarah

All:   We gather to worship the Lord.

One:  With the saints of every age

All:   We gather to worship the Lord.

One:  We embark on our own journey of faith

All:   God’s Holy name be praised.

One:  God makes of us a people of blessing

All:  God’s Holy name be praised.

One:  In the desert and in the den, in barrio or basilica

All:   God’s Holy name be praised.

One:  We journey in the presence of God.

All:  And we do not journey alone.

One:  Let us worship God.

*HYMN 291                                                                  “Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness”                                                     SPIRIT

*PRAYER OF CONFESSION                                                                                                   Ed Kinschner

God of the long road, we confess that we like to stay put. We would rather guard what we have than open our hands and let it go. We build fences where you asked for tables. We hold on to good things until they spoil in our grip. We have been generous when it was easy and cautious when it cost us something.

Forgive us. Loosen our hands. Set us moving again that you might bless the world through our living.

Silence is kept for individual confession…  Amen.

*ASSURANCE OF PARDON

*RESPONSE OF PRAISE 582   “Glory to God, Whose Goodness Shines on Me”   GLORY TO GOD

*PASSING OF THE PEACE                                       

     One:   The peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all,

     All:      And also with you.

WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD

ANTHEM                                      “Draw the Circle Wide”                                    Mark Miller

CHILDREN’S MESSAGE                                                                  Jeremy Carroll

PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION 

SCRIPTURE   Genesis 12:1-9   CEB

The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your land, your family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation and will bless you. I will make your name respected, and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you,  those who curse you I will curse; all the families of the earth will be blessed because of you.”

Abram left just as the Lord told him, and Lot went with him. Now Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran.  Abram took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all of their possessions, and those who became members of their household in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in Canaan,  Abram traveled through the land as far as the sacred place at Shechem, at the oak of Moreh. The Canaanites lived in the land at that time.  The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “I give this land to your descendants,” so Abram built an altar there to the Lord who appeared to him.  From there he traveled toward the mountains east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and worshipped in the Lord’s name.  Then Abram set out toward the arid southern plain, making and breaking camp as he went.

SERMON                                                                                             Rev Trip Porch

WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD

*HYMN INSERT                        “Lord, You Have Lavished on Your Land”                                     MELITA 

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE  followed by the Lord’s Prayer

TIME OF OFFERING online giving is available at  www. indianolapres.org/give

OFFERTORY                               “The God of Sarah Praise”                   arr. James Michael Stevens

*OFFERTORY RESPONSE  709              “God, We Honor You”                                   ABUNDANT BLESSINGS

*PRAYER OF DEDICATION

God, we have been blessed so that we might be a blessing. Take what we return to you and send it out past us, farther than we will ever see. Amen.                                                                                                                                                                                                                

*HYMN INSERT                            “The God of Sarah Praise”                                                     LEONI

TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING

CHARGE & BENEDICTION 

BENEDICTION RESPONSE          "The Grace of Our Lord Jesus"             James A. Brown Jr.   

                                                                                                                                                                                 arr. K. Lee Scott

POSTLUDE                   “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”        arr. Brent Edstrom                                                                    

Acknowledgments: Unless otherwise indicated, all texts and music are printed and broadcast under OneLicense.net license #A-702452