If you’ll bear with me for a minute or two, I’d like to teach you a little about the Sumerian Empire. There won’t be a test, and I promise I’ll tell you why I think it’s important when we’re done.

First, please don’t confuse "Sumerians" with "Samaritans," like the Good Samaritan or the Samaritan woman at the well. Samaritans lived around Jesus’s time, and the Sumerian Empire had come and gone thousands of years before then. We’re not going to talk about Samaritans today.

The Sumerian Empire existed more than five thousand years ago between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers, in what is now Iraq. Now, before I learned about them as part of biblical studies, all I knew about the Sumerians was a vague memory of having learned in school that they invented writing, which was called cuneiform writing because they used a small triangular stylus called a cuneiform to make symbols for words. The reason they invented writing was that they were a culture of merchants, very crafty at business, and keeping track of all those accounts was just too much without writing, so they invented it.

Sumer’s capital city, Ur, was probably the first real city in human history. It was made of brick, it was three miles square, and it was a jumble of temples, dwellings, warehouses, and alleyways. (No zoning, apparently.) The Sumerians were quite sophisticated. They dominated their region and established strong trade links with far away empires. They brewed beer. They invented construction techniques that used arches, domes, and vaults, and for the first time humanity could erect large buildings, huge warehouses, and majestic temples. Their techniques of farming and animal husbandry were extraordinarily sophisticated (they had two hundred words for different varieties of sheep). Their medicine was practical, not magical, and they had remedies for great many ailments. And, since I’m "mathematically challenged," I’m especially impressed by their ability to calculate square roots, and cube roots, and the area of an irregular shape. (Don’t ask me to do any of that!)

Sumer is generally thought of as the world’s first civilization, and the Sumerians seemed to have sensed their place in history. Like many civilizations that think of themselves as "advanced," they viewed other cultures with a mixture of misconception, contempt, and disgust born of their prejudice. In particular, they viewed the Nomads, (like the people who inhabited Canaan, for example), as near animals who warred constantly, ate uncooked meat, had no homes, and didn’t even bury their dead.

But what’s most important for us to understand is the Sumerians’ worldview. That worldview said that the meaning of life is that there is no meaning. Human beings were the property of the gods, who created them to be their slaves and to offer them sacrifices, sometimes of human beings. The gods ruled arbitrarily and often cruelly; you could never know when you were keeping them happy, or when you might be squished like a bug for no reason at all. Most importantly, everything in life was determined by fate. Fate ruled the universe, and there was no point in bucking it. Nothing you could do could change anything. The Wheel of Fate, symbolized by the seasons of the year, turned again and again and crushed human beings. And if you somehow survived the inexorable Wheel of Fate, death was inescapable, and it meant the end of happiness.

The best you could do was to try to enjoy the moments of pleasure you could snatch out of this life over which you had no control. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerians’ greatest mythology, Gilgamesh was advised not to go on a journey to seek to correct an injustice (going on a quest to change things made no sense), but he is told instead that death will come, so:

Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full,

Day and night enjoy yourself in every way

Every day arrange for pleasures.

Day and night, dance and play,

It is the advice that will later be give by Epicurus: "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die," (and it all means nothing).

So, what do we care? What difference does it make to us who the Sumerians were or what they believed? We care because Abram, later to be renamed "Abraham," lived in Ur, the capital city of Sumer. And the Lord, whom Abram did not know and probably thought was one of many gods — his own personal household god — told Abram to do something absurd: "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house. Go on a journey, a quest to change things. I won’t tell you where you are going. But I will make you three promises: (1) I will make of you a great nation; (2) I will give you land, and (3) you will be a blessing to the world, a light to the nations."

This was preposterous for both practical and philosophical reasons. Practically, it made no sense because Abram was seventy-five years old, and he was childless, and his wife, Sarai (who would later be renamed "Sarah"), was barren and was now too old to have children anyway. How could Abram be the father of a great nation? Ridiculous! And who wants to go on a journey without knowing the destination? Absurd!

Furthermore, this God was asking him to leave his home, where he was a wealthy merchant, and go into the surrounding land inhabited by these people the Sumerians considered barbarians, people who ate raw meat, and who didn’t bury their dead. Disgusting!

Finally, going on a quest of this sort flew in the face of the Sumerian worldview. And there was no escaping that worldview. That view that human beings exist only to serve the whims of the gods and will be crushed under the Wheel of Fate was, with minor variations, shared by every culture on earth. Every culture on earth! Africans, Europeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Mayans, every culture on earth would say the same thing to Abram for even considering journeying for a god who promises to change things, who promises to be kind: "You have taken leave of your senses. That’s not the way it is."

Can you imagine how frustrating that worldview, shared by all the world, must have been to the God we know? Perhaps we can hear some of God’s frustration. When God says, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house," the Hebrew verb is in a form that conveys an immediacy and urgency that is difficult to capture in English. Perhaps we should think of God saying to Abram, "Git! Scoot! Scat!"

And when God says that to this wily, crafty Sumerian merchant, all of history hangs in the balance. "Git! Scoot! Scat!" God is proposing that a radically different worldview replace that of slavery to the gods and helpless submission to fate.

You know, I’ll say this for believing that everything is predetermined by relentless fate: it’s easy. That kind of belief relieves the believer of any responsibility at all ("I couldn’t help it; it was fate"), and it provides a comforting certainty, even if it has pretty terrible consequences. And I think we humans search for that kind of certainty. This morning, St. Paul addresses another kind of certainty, called "Works Righteousness," the belief that we must earn God’s favor. Almost two thousand years ago, Paul was disputing that notion, saying that it was simply Abram’s faith, Abram’s willingness to trust God, that was the basis for God’s grace. The grace, the love, is always there, Paul says, it’s just a question of whether we will trust God enough to accept it.

But, you know, Works Righteousness is a pretty tempting worldview. We humans don’t do so well with gifts, with being given something for no good reason at all, not even our birthday or Christmas or anything. And it seems that we want to be at one pole or the other; either we want to be like the Sumerians, acknowledging that we are totally out of control, that all we can do is endure relentless fate, or we want to be like the folks Paul was writing to, believing that surely we have to do something to earn God’s love, surely it couldn’t be as simple as accepting it.

I believe, by the way, that Works Righteousness is one of the predominant worldviews Christians in this country hold, lip service to the contrary notwithstanding. Last week I was in that temple of contemporary culture, the Waffle House, and on the juke box was a Country and Western song in which a man was singing, "I’m just working hard to get into heaven." Everyone just kept eating their eggs; I think they would be very surprised to learn that "working hard to get into heaven" is not really a Christian worldview.

But, I digress. Let’s get back to Abram. God is proposing that a radically different worldview replace that of slavery to the gods and helpless submission to fate, and, Paul adds for us, that of earning God’s love. What new wordview could this possibly be? How different could it possible be?

Very different. Unimaginably different. God is going to take humanity from a worldview that says, "We are slaves to cruel gods and helpless subjects of fate," or a worldview that says, "God loves us if we’re good enough," to one that says something so amazing: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."

And it all started with Abram, with one man responding to a ridiculous request to leave the worldview of his ancestors. God said, "Git! Scoot! Scat!" and, in a decision that affected the entire course of human history, we learn that, "Abram went, as the Lord had told him."

All of us occasionally hold worldviews that are not of God. I certainly find myself sometimes slipping into that. Some of us might hold them most of the time. Whether the unchristian worldview you hold, or even just borrow when you need it, is the Sumerian Wheel of Fate, or Works Righteousness, or revenge, or self-protection, or fear, or something else, God calls you to a different wordview, the view of God’s love freely given, the view of God on a cross, suffering for a world that doesn’t deserve it.

Think about how your worldview sometimes differs from that, and hear the word of the Lord: "Git! Scoot! Scat!"