Month: June 2008

Proper 8, Year A, 2008

/ Sarah / 2 Comments

What in the world is happening?  What was good is now evil.  What was clear is now blurry.  The stars might as well have fallen out of the sky.  The ocean might as well have reclaimed the land.  Everything is wrong and disoriented and awful.

God has asked Abraham to kill Isaac.

Not only has God asked Abraham to kill Isaac, when God gives Abraham the instructions to do so, God seems to have forgotten who Abraham is.  Robert Alter, an Old Testament Scholar, points out that we seem to be hearing one side of a two-sided conversation. The Hebrew reads, “Take pray, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac. . .”  And you can almost hear Abraham saying, “But I have two sons.  What about Ishmael? I love both of them.  Oh, you mean Isaac.”  From the very beginning of the conversation Abraham is disoriented, we the readers are disoriented, the whole world seems disoriented.

After all, we’ve just spent several weeks with Abraham and Sarah, a rare opportunity to spend more than one Sunday on any particular Biblical character.  We have journeyed with them.  We have joyfully and with trepidation followed behind them as they took the risk to follow God in the first place.  We have waited, and waited, and waited with them for the birth of their long-promised child, Isaac.  And when Sarah and Abraham were finally blessed with the squirming squealing newborn we laughed with them in astonishment that God’s blessing actually came true, despite the incredible odds against that blessing.

Now should be the time for celebration.  Now should be the time to raise Isaac into a responsible young man.  Now should be the time of passing the torch from one generation to the next.  Instead, God seems poised to rip the promise he has made right out of Abraham’s faithful hands. 

Strangely, Abraham does not even argue.  And Abraham knows how to argue with God.  In fact, in Chapter 19 of Genesis, Abraham goes head to head with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  God wants to destroy the cities, but Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family live there.  Abraham bargains with God until God agrees that if even ten people in the city are righteous, he will not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.  The argument finally resolves when God enables the righteous Lot and his family to escape, and then destroys the city.  Abraham may not have affected the ultimate outcome, but he did learn that he is allowed to argue with God.

But now, when his son’s life depends on it, Abraham does not argue.  Abraham is silent and obedient. Abraham splits wood, gathers a cleaver and some rope, calls to Isaac and begins the journey up the mountain.   They must have left early in the morning, maybe even before Sarah awoke.  I imagine she would have had a thing or two to say to Abraham if she knew what he was doing.

We are not given any information about Abraham’s thoughts or emotions during this test. We don’t know if he really believes he is going to have to kill Isaac or whether he trusts God to find another way.  All we know is that he makes the trip, reluctant step by reluctant step.  We know he piles the wood, binds his son’s arms and legs, and lifts his cleaver.

What we have here seems more like a script from a horror movie than a biblical passage.

When we talk about God in the Church, we have a tendency to focus on the love of Jesus or on the power of the Holy Spirit.  We talk about intimacy with God, tenderness, grace, acceptance.  We talk about God in ways that make us comfortable.  We think about God in ways that do not challenge the ways we live. Because God has been mediated through Jesus, we forget that God is a consuming fire.  We forget that God is powerful and that the sacrifice God wants is us, and as we say in the Eucharistic prayer, “our selves, our souls and bodies.”

But God is a consuming fire. God’s love is powerful and devouring.

And it is this love that motivates God to test Abraham.

God has taken a big risk with Abraham.  He has staked a future with Abraham and his offspring.  This did not work out well with Adam and Eve.  Even Noah dissolved into a drunken mess after awhile.  God is trying one more time and he wants to make sure he gets it right.  So, he tests Abraham.

God wants all of Abraham.  He wants all of Abraham’s passion and love and commitment.  He wants Abraham’s devotion so much, God is willing to see if he will sacrifice his very future, his beloved son, his promised blessing, to prove that devotion.

God tests Abraham to make sure he is the kind of man that will follow God in any situation.

And Abraham passes God’s test.

And we are left feeling ambivalent and uncomfortable because in passing God’s test, Abraham showed his willingness to commit a horrible act, an act so abusive and traumatizing that we cannot fully celebrate Abraham’s success. 

We do not know exactly how we are supposed to interpret this difficult passage. We do know that Abraham saw God in a new way after the test, and in fact the words see, eyes, and look are peppered throughout this passage.  Moriah even means “he sees”.  Abraham’s trip up the mountain was a transformative experience for him as well as for God.  Abraham learns that God will provide for him even in the moment of greatest need and God learns that Abraham will be faithful to Him even at great personal cost.  Yet still, we feel tension.

And perhaps we are meant to remain in that tension. Tension helps us not get too comfortable with God.  Tension prevents us from taking God’s will for us too lightly. Tension prevents us from us taking God’s sacrifice too lightly.

After all, Isaac’s horrible story sheds light on another Son who traveled up a hill, carrying the very wood on which he would be killed.

Perhaps this story helps us remember that other story, the story we honor with Easter bunnies, pastel dresses and decorated eggs.  This story helps us remember Jesus’ story was filled with fear and dread, too.

Perhaps Abraham’s story reminds us that though Abraham passed his test, as a human race we were unable to remain faithful to God.  But God was willing to make the same sacrifice he asked of Abraham.  And that sacrifice was brutal and cruel and bloody.  Perhaps, as we imagine the pain Abraham experienced, we are to discern a bit of what God experienced when his own Son was sacrificed.  God was willing to give us all of himself, so that we could be in relationship with Him.

In any case, this passage reminds us, as Charley told us last week, that grace is not cheap.  Discipleship is not easy.  A relationship with God demands that we give to God all that we consider most dear, even at great personal cost.

Amen.

Proper 6, Year A, 2008

/ Sarah / 1 Comment

Sarah had waited twenty-four years.  Twenty-four years have passed between last week’s passage and this week’s passage.  Sarah has been following Abraham around a quarter of a century, waiting to see what God means by his blessing.  Years after the original promise, not long before today’s reading, God told Abraham he would have as many descendents as there are stars in the sky, but still Sarah has not gotten pregnant.

For years Sarah has lived with this hope, only to see her hope dashed over and over and over again.  First, each month that came had the disappointment of a monthly flow visibly reminding her that she was not pregnant.  Now, she is years into menopause, well past the hot flashes and mood swings, and her hopes of becoming pregnant are completely encased in the cement of cold, hard reality.

Sarah has tried to be obedient to God.  She has maintained Abraham’s household.  She has followed him to places she would never go of her own accord.  Sarah even tried to arrange for Abraham to have a child through another woman, her servant, Hagar.  But, as you can imagine, surrogacy did not turn out well.  Sarah soon could not take the painful sight of another woman happily playing with Abraham’s child, and banished them both.  Sarah has tried to be open to God’s blessing, but reality has crushed her dream.

So when Sarah welcomes a stranger into her home and goes out of her way to prepare a lush meal for him, and then overhears this stranger making bold claims about Sarah’s reproductive future, well, I think the visitor was lucky all Sarah did was laugh.  We don’t know if Sarah knew the visitor was God.  But we do know that she laughed.  And we know that laugh was not rooted in joy, but in deep disappointment and disgust that this visitor would so casually claim Sarah would bear a child. This laughter bore the pain of twenty-four years of doing what God had asked of her and seeing no blessing in return.  This laughter bore the pain of her own, personal desire to be a mother, which had been dashed month after month.

To add insult to injury, the stranger tells Abraham that Sarah will bear a child in “due season”.  Due season? Sarah is in her nineties, for crying out loud.  Due season would have been twenty-four years ago when God began making these promises.  Due season would have 50 years ago, when Sarah was still in her thirties and had the energy to deal with child bearing, nursing, and rearing.  “Due season” has come and gone a looooong time ago.

We know, ultimately, that Sarah does get pregnant.  But that pregnancy does not come for THREE MORE CHAPTERS. Our lectionary reading transposes her pregnancy to the end of this passage, but a lot more goes down in Abraham and Sarah’s life before they are blessed with Isaac’s birth.  There are many stories in the Hebrew Scriptures of barren women miraculously becoming pregnant, but Sarah’s story is the only one of these stories in which the time between God’s promise and the ultimate pregnancy is so agonizingly long. 

Remember, Sarah and Abraham are the first couple with whom God is exploring this new covenant.  He has committed to being their God and they have committed to being God’s people.  And what does God do to celebrate this relationship?  (Besides asking Abraham and all the men in the family to get circumcised, of course.)  God asks them to wait.  He asks Abraham and Sarah to follow him and trust that he will provide an heir, and not only an heir, but a nation of descendents that will be God’s chosen people for thousands of years.

This waiting is not unique to Abraham and Sarah.  Waiting is a profound part of the experience of being in relationship with God.  Abraham and Sarah had to wait a quarter of a century to get pregnant.  Job had to wait for answers from God.  The Israelites had to wait forty years to finally arrive in the Promised Land.  Even Jesus’ disciples had to wait three days between Jesus death and his resurrection. 

God calls us to keep following him, and calls us to wait.  And this waiting can cause us terrible suffering.  Those who struggle with infertility, waiting month after month suffer deeply.  Those who wait to find work as the economy struggles, suffer.  Those who wait to heal suffer.  Those who wait for true love suffer.  Those who wait for their sons, daughters to return from war suffer.  Those who wait for grief to subside suffer. This suffering can feel incredibly painful and very personal, but it is important to remember that the suffering of waiting is not a punishment or a rebuke.  In Paul’s letter to the Romans today, he calls us to:

. . .boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,  and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,  and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

When I was a child and had to do something I did not want to do, my father would always tell me, “It will build character, Sarah.”  The word character sours after while, when building character means making your bed, being nice to your sister, staying late to help clean, working on your science project instead of going to the circus when your sister gets to go to the circus with your most hilarious family friend who does magic tricks with his hat. (Deep breath)

But I digress. . .

I don’t know about you, but to me, character and hope do not seem like related words at all.  Character is a stodgy word, and hope is a lofty word.  Character is about hard work and discipline and hope is about dreaming and longing.  Character is about being firm and grounded and hope is about taking big emotional risks.

So, why does Paul link these words to suffering?  How does our waiting give us hope? 

I think the imagery we discussed last week-the imagery of our lives with God as a journey is helpful here.  After all, when we wait, we are not just sitting on our couches holding perfectly still waiting for God to show up.  No, when we wait, we wait actively: going to work, loving our friends and families, and most importantly staying connected with God.  When we wait, whether we wait patiently, eagerly, or bitterly, we pray about that waiting.  We ask God.  We beseech God.  We may rail at God.  But in the waiting, in the praying, God is at work in us, maturing us, developing us to be the people he has designed us to be.

Oftentimes we have transformative experiences while we wait.  We may discover our friends’ deep love for us when we wait, or feel the deep presence of God while we wait.   And when we feel the deep presence of God, we realize that God loves us in a profound way, and that love and that sense of God’s immanence gives us hope.  Paul’s passage is not about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, but about the intense, personal, transformative experience of suffering in the light of God’s love for us.

Paul suffered. He was shipwrecked.  He was imprisoned.  He was blinded for a time. He had some unnamed “thorn” in his side.  Paul knew what it was to wait for God, to wait for answers.  Paul knew first hand that the suffering he encountered during his long journey of faith was transformed by God into something enriching and life giving, even before his problems were resolved or God’s answers were revealed.

Some who suffer, like Sarah ultimately rejoice.  In the 21st chapter of Genesis we read: 

The LORD dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”

Sarah’s bitter laughter is transformed back into the joyous laughter of delight, and she even names her son Isaac, which means “He will laugh.” 

But not everyone who waits receives the object of their desire.  Even for those who get bad news, whose longings never disappear, who still ache with desire for some unmet need, even these people are offered the hope that comes from an intimacy with God.  This hope is not an easy hope.  This hope is born of stodgy, sturdy words like suffer, endurance and character.  This hope is hewn out of the rough wood of prayer after unanswered prayer.  This hope is borne from open raw hearts meeting the living God, and being filled with God’s spirit. 

This hope is Sarah’s hope, and Paul’s hope, and Job’s hope.  This is the hope of the grieving disciples.   This hope is your hope, all of you who wait, and all of you who yearn. 

And this hope will come. It is God’s promise to you, and as surely as he granted Sarah a child, he will grant you this hope.

Amen.

Proper 5, Year A, 2008

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Not very many heroes of epic novels or movies get to stay in one location.  Odysseus, Lawrence of Arabia, Huck Finn, Frodo, Marlow, Dante, Dorothy, Nemo, even the quirky family from Little Miss Sunshine!  All of these characters go on a journey.  Their journeys may be long or short, traumatic or hilarious, sacrificial or selfish.  For each character, the journey is an important, transformative experience, as important, if not more important, than the goal itself.

Journeys are important because they get us out of our normal rhythms.  When on a journey, you do not come home and crash in front of the TV every day, or have the same conversations with your same neighbors day after day.  When you’re on a journey, you don’t even have to show up for work in the morning.  There are no cubicles, reports, or emails on a journey.  A journey bursts us from the constraints of our routines and obligations and opens us to new experiences and new sense of our own identity.  During a journey we find out if we are flexible or rigid; adventurous or timid; brave or fearful. 

Perhaps this is why, throughout God’s history with his people, as soon as he calls us, he sends us on a journey.

You might have noticed over the last few weeks, that in our lectionary we have begun hearing the stories of Genesis, the first book of the Bible.  Genesis is full of stories of people on the move, doing God’s work.  Today, we hear the story of Abram, the father of  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  His faith in God would establish the three largest religions in history.

When I went back to Genesis to remind myself of Abram’s story, I had thought I would find out some backstory.  I wanted to know whether Abram and God had any previous encounters, whether they had several conversations before our passage today. Surely, God had been slowly preparing Abram for the life-changing encounter they have in today’s passage.

But it turns out that Genesis tells us nothing about Abram’s personal history with God.  The only information Genesis reveals about Abram before our passage today is that he was the son of Terah, a descendent of Noah and that Abram had a wife named Sarai and a nephew named Lot.

This lack of information makes Abram’s willingness to leave his home and journey off to the great unknown even more powerful.  Abram does not argue with God, he simply packs up his things and goes.  However, if you read the text carefully, you’ll learn that Abram does not follow God’s directions perfectly.  God tells Abram to leave his kindred behind, and instead Abram takes his nephew Lot with him.  Even now, we get a sense that Abram is not a complete pushover and that his relationship with God will not be a simple one.

This ambiguity-this not quite so obedient obedience-is a great introduction to Abram’s journey and the rest of Genesis, really.  God does not choose cookie cutter people to do his work.  You do not have to be sweet and passive and perfect to do God’s work.  In fact, I can’t think of one character in Genesis who is unblemished in some way.  To follow God, all you have to be willing to do is to hear God out and then take a risk.

And what a risk Abram took! 

Imagine-Abram had no context-no Bible stories, no history of God’s faithfulness on which to draw when he made the decision to follow God.  All he had was a family story about his great, great, great, great, great-grandfather Noah and how God preserved his family in the midst of an incredible flood.

But Abram is able to take this family history, and this incredible personal experience of God, and use them to give him the courage to break out of his routine, to burst out of the confines of how he perceived himself, his family and his culture and take a risk to go on what will be an incredible journey.

God promises Abram land and blessings, but for God, the land was not the point.  For God, I think, it was important to send Abram on a journey so that as Abram traveled, Abram could learn to trust God more and more.  I don’t want to spoil anything, since we’ll talk more about Abram’s journey the next couple of weeks, but Abram encounters all kinds of crazy challenges and abundant blessings as he journeys with God.  Abram learns about himself and what it means to have faith in God by journeying away from his ordinary, day-to-day, life.  Abram even gets a new name-Abraham-to mark God’s role in his life. 

What would God need to do to break us out of our routines?  I shudder to think how I would react if God told me to hand over my laptop, my closet full of clothes, and my nice rented house and go wander across the country.  I don’t think I would be as amenable as Abram.  I think I would ask lots of whiny questions, like:  How am I going to eat?  What do you want me to do?  What should I pack? Could I at least have a GPS?

God may not call us to literally leave home like he called Abram, but he still does call us to go on a journey of faith with him. Thinking of our lives as a journey rather than a series of responsibilities gives us a framework to understand our lives in a new way.  A relationship with God is never static.  As we experience each new day of our life, God calls us to journey along with him and to keep our eyes open for what he is doing in the world and how we might fit into that activity.  Occasionally, following God’s journey for us may lead us to do something radical-to travel somewhere we’ve never been, or to talk to someone who has nothing in common with us.  God’s journey may lead us to fight for the disenfranchised or to care for the poor.  God’s journey may lead us toward forgiving someone or even reconciling others in conflict.

Wherever our journey leads us, we can be sure that we will encounter many adventures along the way.  And those adventures will stretch us and shape us into the people God has dreamed we can be.  Thanks be to God.

Proper 4, Year A, 2008

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Noah was a man with a vocation.

God called Noah, clear as a bell, and told him to build a boat.  God told Noah to build a big boat.  God told Noah to build a boat so big that it could hold a pair of every kind of animal under the sun.

Living in Crozet, we have had the unique opportunity to see the Ark in person-at least Hollywood’s version of the Ark-and we know the Ark was one big boat.  But I’ll bet you a dollar that when Noah was in that big boat, on top of the choppy seas, on about day twenty of the rainstorm, Noah felt like he was in a flimsy little basket, floating on the great unknown.

Can you imagine?  All of humanity has been wiped out, and God has chosen you to be cruise director, zookeeper. . .and, oh yeah, put you in charge of repopulating the earth.  Noah must have been one nervous navigator.

Discerning our vocations can make us feel like we’re on flimsy little baskets, floating on the great unknown, too.  We stand side by side with Noah and his poor wife when we ask God, “Who am I?  Who would you have me be?”

After all, our first vocational act is to be baptized, to submit ourselves to the mystery of water and the Spirit in order to be transformed and welcomed as God’s very own.  From that time on, our job as Christians is to pray and discern who God is calling us to be.  When we are children we are called to be children-to play and to learn.  We are to immerse ourselves in the language of our faith through Sunday School and Children’s Worship and prayers around the dinner table.  Then, when we grow up, and we start realizing the gifts God has given us, we leave the playground and go to work.  Sometimes this is our vocation, and sometimes it is just work.  After all, for one person crunching numbers may be an area of excellence AND an area of passion, but their neighbor in the office next door may feel as much passion for numbers as they do for the color beige.

The trick to figuring out God’s call for us, the trick to figuring out our vocation is to find the place, as Buecher said, “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  As Christians we are called to serve, and our true vocations will always contain some element of service.

Discerning vocation can be frightening.  Having steady work is the opposite of being adrift in a basket on a stormy sea.  Having a good, steady job is like being firmly planted in nourishing soil.  Leaving such an auspicious state can seem absolutely crazy!  But discerning your vocation is still worth it, I promise.  First, because at our core our deepest need is to have meaning, and our vocation gives us meaning.  Secondly, discerning our vocation does not always mean having to leave our jobs!

It is entirely possible to work full time in a job that is not your vocation, and find your vocation doing something on the side:  writing,  volunteering for hospice, taking on more pro bono work, teaching classes in your field to those who can use the knowledge.  One of my favorite parts of being your priest, is getting to hear your stories of vocation.  Those of you who raise service dogs, visit with the dying, serve food to the poor, coordinate after school programs, and the like have such deep joy and meaning in your lives.  Your vocational work is not always easy and can even be heart rending, but you are expressing the deepest part of yourself in a way that serves our community and our God.

When we begin this vocational discernment, we might find it helpful to remember that God doesn’t just send us out in our rickety baskets on uneasy waters.  God also inhabits the very water that upholds our boats.  God bears us gently even as we seek to follow him.  God is present in our vocation and in our search for that vocation.

And today as we baptize Stuart Caroline, she begins her own vocation as the newest, littlest Christian in Christendom.  She joins us on our rickety boats as we go off on our ocean adventure together.

Amen.