Trinity 1 2026

(Genesis 12: 1-9)

 Watching programs like Pilgrimage or Race Across the World have you found yourself thinking: I could never do that — or perhaps imagining that you might and who you might choose as your travel companion?

Part of the fascination of those journeys is not simply the travelling itself, but the uncertainty. Those taking part leave behind familiar routines, are limited in what they can carry, often don’t know exactly where they will sleep, how they will get there, or what they will discover along the way. Plans change. Weather shifts. The journey transforms them and we realise 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 doesn’t 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 and 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 and becomes vulnerable, unsettled, dependent.

And perhaps many of us today know something of that feeling.

Journeying into the unknown when facing illness, ageing or bereavement
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 the book of Genesis suggests something important: God is encountered not only in settled places, but on the journey itself.
Again and again Abram pauses and builds altars.

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, things that are temporary. 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.

Modern life often feels like constant motion. We move quickly from one thing to another and can slowly lose the ability to stop and notice where God has already met us.

When Abram stopped to pray, to build those altars, he does not control the landscape around him or possess the land. The promise of God to him is not yet fulfilled. Abram walks through uncertainty, incompleteness, and tension.

And he still 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 about learning how to travel faithfully that is important not about his triumphal arrival in a new land and also importantly, Abram is not blessed by God simply for himself. “I will bless you … so that you will be a blessing” says God
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 a private affair. Abram’s calling immediately becomes connected to the healing of the world. The blessing is meant to flow outward into the whole world towards 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 last 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 must be one of the most truthful descriptions of spiritual life in the 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 with God.

The real danger in modern life is not that we are moving too fast, but that we are journeying without altars….without making spaces to encounter God with us in the world through prayer and worship.

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. The holiest thing we can do is simply continue the journey — by stages and to build in those opportunities to encounter God through prayer and worship.

Perhaps that is why programmes like Pilgrimage and Race Across the World touch something so deep within us. We know the journey changes people. Rarely do those taking part finish the journey as the same people who began it. Faith is something like that too. We travel without possessing the map in full. We carry tents more often than certainties. On 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.

Amen