June 29, 2008
(Seventh Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 8)
Now I Know
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Genesis 22:1-14 • Psalm 13
• Romans 6:12-23 • Matthew
10:40-42
(From
The Lectionary Page)
Seems like I’ve logged a lot of time in front of The Weather Channel during the months of May and June. If you find yourself turning to that channel when the sky turns black, then you, too, know that irritating audio signal preceeding the National Weather Service warning which crawls along the bottom of your TV screen. I’m sure that some audiologist was paid a ton of money to identify an audio frequency as the most grating to human ears and therefore the most attention-getting. We are supposed to pay attention AND we want it to stop. It heralds important information AND it raises our anxiety.
With the Weather Channel audio signal as with opening words of our Old Testament lesson today: God tested Abraham. Harsh, grating sound that we cannot ignore but do not want to listen to either. Little wonder that so much ink has been spilled over the centuries trying to explain, trying to domesticate, trying to make palatable the story of the binding of Isaac. Some scholars believe that the story was included to demonstrate that Israel foreswore the ancient near east practice of child sacrifice. Other scholars point to Mt. Moriah later being known as Mt. Zion, the temple mount where animal sacrifices to God were a regular feature of cultic worship during the first and second temple periods in Jewish history. Some Christian theologians see in the binding of Isaac a foreshadowing of the sacrificial death of Jesus, God’s son, God’s only son whom God loved.
For centuries, we have had no dearth of ways of pulling back from the story.
The challenge is to draw near to it.
God tested Abraham. Seems that if anyone should be able to skip this test, it ought to have been Abraham. Abraham had listened to God calling him to leave Ur of the Chaldees and journey to a distant land. Abraham had trusted that God would make good on God’s promise that he, Abraham, would be a great nation, absurd though that promise must have sounded to an 80-year-old man married to a barren woman whose childbearing years were over. The child of promise, Isaac, has been born and Ishmael, the child of bondage, has been removed from the scene at no small emotional cost to Abraham. He’s been about as faithful as any human being could be. Why a test, and why a test that is as gut-wrenching as the one God calls him to? And what are we to make of a God who would devise a test like this?
The emotional hook for us, of course, is the image of anguished father and terrified child. But the true climax of the story is not the angel of God stopping Abraham from carrying out the sacrifice. It is God saying, “Now I know.” God tested Abraham in order to know. Abraham, after all, has been endowed with the gift of free will, a gift given to humankind from the beginning. God, in all of God’s omnipotence, chooses not to abrogate free will in order to command humankind to be faithful or obedient. God, in all of God’s omniscience, chooses not to hold one sure future in the palm of his hand, but an infinite number of futures depending on how we fallible, willful humans choose to use our will. The test is neither a sham to God nor a sure thing to Abraham. Having been given his heart’s desire, will he choose to cling to the gift or will he trust the Giver?
God tested Abraham in order to know. We tend to equate knowledge with data gathering, fact finding. Not surprising. Our capacity as a human race to apply both inductive and deductive reasoning is based on our capacity to seek, retain, and transmit information. We know, for example, that the movement of geological plates in the earth’s crust is related somehow to how carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is recycled. We know that hurricanes are a means of redistributing heat on a planet that has more water than land mass. We know that lightening strikes fix atmospheric nitrogen into rainwater to replenish the fertility of the soil. Yet though we can measure tectonic activity, still we cannot predict the time or the coordinates of an earthquake. Satellite imagery reveals the formation of hurricanes, but we cannot control their path or lessen their fury. Doppler radar warns us of severe weather, but cannot predict exactly where lightening will strike or where tornadoes will touch down. We have more facts, more data, about our world than humankind has ever had.
But knowledge? To know, in Hebrew Scriptures, is not cognitive so much as it is relational. Not for nothing did the Hebrew word for “knowing” come to be used as an expression for sexual intimacy. There is mutuality and a shared vulnerability in knowing and being known. Knowing, in the sense of our lesson today, is less about gathering information and more about engaging a mystery. In giving humankind free will God, in a sense, imposed limits on God’s own omniscience. There is not one straight sure path to the completion of history, there are an infinite number. What patterns will unfold in the choices humankind makes over the millennia? Together, in covenantal relationship, we explore the mystery that we are to one another.
We Christians claim Abraham as our father, as do our kindred Jews and Muslims. The spiritual path we tread as we move toward the fullness of time includes the birth and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, himself no stranger to times of testing: in the wilderness following his baptism, in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his crucifixion. Jesus’s disciples, if they were paying attention, would have recognized that the mission to which Jesus has been preparing them in our last three Sunday’s gospel accounts was also a time of testing. So it has been throughout the centuries by every generation of disciples including our own. Every time we find ourselves between the rock of our culture and the hard place of faithfulness to our baptismal vows, we are being tested. And so it shall be until God draws to a close the infinite strands and patterns of history.
It isn’t just about individual outcomes, hooked though we are by the horror of the story. Or to put it another way, the data that the test reveals is important only insofar as it reflects the engagement of the relationship. Abraham wasn’t blessed because he was willing to sacrifice his son. Abraham was blessed because he risked engaging fully, in all of its terrifying vulnerability, the relationship to which God called him, infinitely mysterious though it was and though it remains. Blessed are we when we engage the relationship as well with a God who seeks to know and to be known by his beloved children.
The Call to Hospitality
by The Rev. Bruce Hall,
Deacon
As I was writing this sermon the other day I heard someone on the television claiming to have a surefire cure for parents whose children are behaving badly. Words like “miraculous” and “transformation” were used numerous times in describing the effectiveness of the program and parent after parent testified to the empowerment and confidence they enjoyed after viewing the two-DVD set and accompanying workbook. I was curious to see what was being pitched and walked over to the set. Soon thereafter the miracle worker himself appeared and sure enough, he was a fellow social worker. Over the next several minutes he radiated a sure and certain hope that even the most perplexed parent need only adopt his course of study and their lives would be “transformed.” Presumably, there was some benefit for the children as well, but the focus of the pitch seemed directly aimed at the doubts and frustrations of a viewing parent. The equation for relief was simple: follow my directions and you’ll be well—and it’s easy too! I mumbled various things at this point that don’t bear repeating in a Cathedral, switched the channel to one that would better afford the white noise I was seeking, and returned to completing the sermon. And there was the story Abraham preparing to sacrifice one of his children.
I think we all agree that infanticide is wrong (even during summer break) and it may be that this story was included by our ancestors as a means of teaching against this evil. At the same time, we are confronted with a powerful example of how remaining obedient to God, to our true calling as the people of God, can be anything but easy. We may be called to make what appear as impossible choices among those we love and the God we worship. In these moments of spiritual paradox we are invited to experience God and ourselves at a deeper and more profound level in large part because we must genuinely struggle with what it will mean for us to be faithful. What will it cost us? How will others see us differently? Is it possible that God can be present in such moments of seeming contradiction and confusion? Indeed, God is always with us but this does not mean that what is asked of us will be trouble-free.
Take hospitality, for example. Sometime the things that appear easy, like being a good neighbor, can in fact be very difficult. Jesus was teaching his disciples about the importance of hospitality to one another. They were connected to one another through Him and through Him, to the Father. Each of us also is called to welcome one another as equal members of the body of Christ. And we are called to do this not as some edict from above but as the natural response, “obedient from the heart” to use St. Paul’s language from Romans, to God’s love for us. Many times we do this easily such as when we ask about another’s health or provide dinner for a family taking care of one who is seriously ill. We create a space of welcome when we greet the newcomer standing awkwardly near the doors during coffee hour or when we volunteer our labor in helping the poor and lonely. It is not uncommon to feel good afterwards and one may enjoy a more concrete sense that they have done something that tangibly helped another. This sort of welcoming is always to be commended and practiced and, it may often be a simpler hospitality than the one described in today’s Gospel.
In today’s reading we are asked to do a more difficult thing by welcoming those who may make us feel uncomfortable by what they say and how they live. When we welcome a prophet, we are creating more than a space of hospitality but an arena where truth can be spoken to power and where our deepest convictions might be challenged. This is harder than pouring a cup of coffee or offering a donut because those do not demand our own vulnerability and openness to criticism. Prophets, by their nature, challenge the status quo in their communities and can be unsettling to us as individuals. The Righteous too and be difficult to welcome because they remind us of who we are called to be. Usually, they remind us through living out of their faith in a manner that can at once inspire and shame us. By their example we are more conscious of those moments when we have not loved God with all our heart or our neighbor as ourselves. To invite this level of hospitality, to actively create a place of conversation within the church has often been difficult yet, we are called to welcome each other just as we would welcome Christ. In a short time, bishops of the Anglican Communion will meet at Lambeth and will wrestle with what it means to welcome one another. This nothing new really, as conventions and councils have always consisted of people who, despite their failings, struggle to be faithful to the truth that is within them as have many here at this cathedral over the last several years.
Sometimes to welcome others, the prophet, the righteous, the sinner, the poor, the lonely and oppressed, will cost us more than our time and money. It may cost us those we love. Last Sunday’s gospel challenged us directly to consider how discipleship can cost us the people we hold most dear, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, our children. For some of us, this has happened in immensely painful ways as close friends have become distant acquaintances or a beloved parish a parish of our past. The loss of people dear to us has been hard for many Episcopalians as fights over property as well as doctrine continue to attract our attention, our prayers, and too frequently our grief. Christ knows our grief and the pain that each of us may experience as we try to figure out what it means to be faithful to Christ’s teachings. Many families have faced the dilemma of confronting loved ones when they believe that wrong has been done or that this person is in danger of hurting herself or someone else. To intervene knowing that by doing do you may permanently alienate someone so very dear demands a certainty and courage that fails many of us when we consider the cost in some of our most important relationships. It is no easier when it is we who are being confronted and may feel judged, rejected, and alone. There are many feeling such things in our church today and, I’m afraid, there are not easy answers here, no quick fix, no DVDs with workbooks to relieve our discomfort. It has not been easy, has it? It won’t be easy tomorrow either.
What we do have is a common master in God. As we share the simple words of the creeds this can be a way that we might whether these hard times together. In doing so we are renewing our desire to create a place of welcome to all of God’s people. We are asked by Christ to receive each other with love, and perhaps as we do so we can be mindful that one man’s prophet is another man’s heretic. The world must not be divided into simple categories of the holy and profane for we as a holy people are also capable of getting things wrong as any history book of the church will illustrate. Let us recommit ourselves to welcome each other in love even as we see things differently, united by our common life in Christ and slavery before God.
