June 7, 2026
Pentecost 2 / Proper 5, Year A
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Genesis 12:1-9 ~ Psalm 33:1-12 ~ Romans 4:13-25 ~ Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
Most of you surely know by now that Tim and I are serious baseball fans. Just this spring, we fulfilled our goal of visiting the last of the thirty major league ballparks. That goal sent us on a decade full of adventures all over this country. Because we love baseball so much, we also love films about baseball, from The Natural to A League of Their Own to Bull Durham to The Sandlot, but the one probably at the top of the list is Field of Dreams. In fact, on one of our baseball adventures, I realized that we would be driving through Iowa, and if we were driving through Iowa, we had to go to Dyersville where Field of Dreams was filmed. Tim called that little side trip an Elaine long-cut.
For those of you not familiar with this film, it’s about a writer named Ray Kinsella (played by a particularly dreamy Kevin Costner) who builds a baseball diamond right in the middle of his cornfield because a mysterious voice told him, “If you build it, he will come.” A lot happens as he tries to figure out what this is all about, but there is one encounter that he has with an old ballplayer named Archibald Graham who played, briefly, for the New York Giants in 1905 but never had an official at bat. Moonlight Graham, as he was known, left baseball to fulfill his dream of becoming a physician, and he was well-respected throughout his life serving the community of Chisolm, MN.
Kinsella gets another mysterious message leading him to Minnesota to ask Dr. Graham to come with him to his ballfield in Iowa so he can finally get that dreamed-of at-bat. But Graham, played by Bert Lancaster, refuses the invitation, saying, “This is my most special place in all the world. Once a place touches you like this, the wind never blows so cold again. You hold it like it’s your child. I can’t leave Chisolm. I was born here, I lived here, I’ll die here. And no regrets.”
When God shows up in Genesis 12, the first thing God says to Abram is, “Go. Go to this place you’ve never been. I’ll show you where it is.” And I wonder if Abram, like Moonlight Graham, wonders why he should leave his home. He’s an old man. He lives in Haran with his family. He’s settled. Maybe for him it’s the most special place in the world. But God said, “go,” and he went.
Did he argue about it? Did Sarai his wife ask him if he was out of his mind? We can read into it what we will, but whatever else he did in response to God’s command to “go,” he picked up and went.
By the time Jesus encounters Matthew the tax collector, he already has a band of eleven named disciples plus any number of women and other followers. As a despised tax collector, bilking people out of what little they had to pay the Roman tax and to line his own pockets for his trouble, Matthew was not, at first glance, a likely choice for Jesus. Or was he? I think maybe he was, living on the edge of respectability and outside any kind of community of friends. We don’t know why Jesus called Matthew any more than we know why God called Abram. And we certainly don’t know what the thought process could possibly have been that made them pick up and go. But go they did.
Can you think of a time in your life that you’ve heard a voice or felt a nudge or been compelled through some unidentified invitation to go or do something you never imagined doing? Maybe it wasn’t as dramatic as dropping everything to go off to divinity school or packing your belongings in a bag and taking off on a solo pilgrimage. But many of you, I am sure, have felt called beyond what you thought possible to answer God’s call in this world. Maybe you’ve dug into your pocket a bit more deeply to give more generously. Or maybe you’ve volunteered to help prepare a meal once a month for years so that our soup kitchen guests have a warm dinner among a community that welcomes them. Maybe you visit women in prison or wield a hammer to build a house or go shopping for school supplies when you haven’t had children in school for decades. Or maybe you are called to stillness, to deepening of prayer, to more consistency in attending worship. Maybe God has nudged you into listening for that still, small voice.
Whatever it is, I hope you “go” where the voice sends you. The promise to Abram is that he would be a blessing. Going to a new land where he would be father of a great nation was not for Abram’s benefit. God said, ” I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2). God’s call is always about a blessing that is shared with others. Even Abram, later to be called Abraham, never owned anything more than the small plot of land near Hebron where he buried his wife Sarah. The blessing wasn’t about him. It was about all the people that followed.
Moonlight Graham may not have wanted to leave home as an old man, but in the mythical world of Field of Dreams, he shows up as a young man, playing on the baseball diamond with Shoeless Joe Jackson and all the other old-time players, and he gets that at-bat that he missed out on so long ago. When Ray Kinsella’s young daughter begins to choke on a hot dog as she is watching the players, Graham steps off the field, becoming once again the old physician, and saves her. When Ray tells him how sorry was that he had to give up playing ball, Graham says, “Son, if I’d only got to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy.” He was blessed to be a blessing after all.
Back in my organ playing days, I had a Friday night and Saturday morning gig at a synagogue in suburban Philadelphia. It seemed like every weekend we had a bar or bat mitzvah, and for every one of those the cantor would sing a song based on this reading from the 12th chapter of Genesis. The name of this song is the Hebrew words lech l’cha which mean, not just “go,” but “go for yourself.” Go, because this is a journey you have to take because I am calling you, blessing you to be a blessing to others. It goes like this:
L’chi lach, to a land that I will show you
Lech l’cha, to a place you do not know
L’chi lach, on your journey I will bless you
And you shall be a blessing l’chi lach
(Debbie Friedman)
Friends, I invite you to listen for the voice telling you, inviting you, to go, and I pray that you will go, because God will bless others because of you.