Genesis 12:1–4
This lectionary passage is a gift for supporters of Migration With Dignity: one of the earliest and clearest descriptions of how migration, the movement of people to new places, is deeply embedded in the mythological history of Israel.
God sends Abram out to a new place (12:1). Abram, who becomes Abraham, the father of faith, goes out into the uncertainty of migration and movement. His “right to movement” is not only exercised but given divine sanction as he sets out as a sojourner into an unknown place.
God shows Abram a new land. God promises Abram that he will become a great nation (12:2)—a promise of safety, flourishing, and a future even when those things seem far away. Abram’s journey, not as a conqueror or a colonizer but simply as a sojourner to a new place, leaving behind his family and the culture and identity he knows, will open up new horizons, making a new space and place for those who follow him.
God blesses Abram. In blessing Abram and making him a blessing (12:2), God reminds us that migration is a blessing. Movement is a blessing. The people who come from afar are a blessing to our society. Moving to a new place and making a new home there is part of the work of blessing that place. The logic of blessing is a generous one; as people and places are blessed they spread blessing onward. This is the deep undercurrent of the MWD Principles: that every person is a blessing; that their rights to movement and safety and their connections to their culture and identity are a new form of blessing to the world.
Hannah Bowman is a member of the Episcopal Migration Caucus who lives in Los Angeles, the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, and the author of Abolition Ecclesiology: A Spatial Theology for a Church Against Prisons (forthcoming from Fortress Press in November 2026).