Preaching Notes

Pentecost 3.A.2014

Old Testament Track: Learning about Discipleship from the First Families

Genesis 22:1-14

An interesting thing about this passage is that it starts out by saying, “After these things God tested Abraham.”

What things? Well, one of these “things” was the story of Hagar and Ishmael being sent into the desert that was the Old Testament lection last week. After that, there is a story about how a guy named Abimelech, the King of Gerar, who tried to take Sarah as a wife. But Abimelech realized the strength of Abraham’s God when God came to him in a dream and told him to return Sarah to Abraham because Abraham was a prophet. God told Abimelech that if he didn’t do it, he would die, but if he did, Abraham would pray for him to live. So Abimelech did what God asked, and after that, Abimelech gave Abraham and Sarah some land, and Abraham prayed for his healing and the restoration of his family because they had been stricken with barrenness.

So thenAbimelech made another appearance. He came to Abraham with the commander of his Army and said, “I know God is with you. I’ve been loyal to you, and I trust you and your God will be loyal to me as well.” Abraham complained that some of Abimelech’s servants had seized his well. Abimelech responded that he didn’t know anything about it. So Abraham took a sheep and an oxen and gave them to Abimelech and madewith him a covenant. Abraham set apart seven lambs. Abimelech asked what it meant and Abraham told him that accepting the seven lambs would mean that he had witnessed that Abraham has dug the well at Beersheba. Abimelech agreed to the covenant and left, and Abraham planted a tree in the name of the Lord to signify the spot where he was to reside in the land of the Philistines.

So it was after all this happened that we come to this decisive moment for Abraham which begins with the line, “After these things God tested Abraham.”

Most times when people interpret the meaning of this story, they say something about how it is a story that points to the absolute trust, obedience, and faithfulness of Abraham to God.

So I’m wondering you preachers all buy that? I mean, let’s make sure we all followed the story so we can be clear on the issues. God says Abraham is going to be tested. Abraham says fine. God tells Abraham to take his beloved son up to the mountain and offer him as a sacrifice. Abraham goes. He lays out the wood upon which he is presumably going to place his son as a burnt offering to the Lord. He ties Isaac up, places his bound body on the altar, and takes out his knife to kill him.

Right at that moment, the angel calls out saying that now the Lord knows that Abraham fears God, since he’s willing to offer his son as a sacrifice. The ram appears in the bush, which Abraham catches, and he offers it instead as his sacrifice. And the Lord again promises Abraham numerous blessings and offspring because of his faithfulness.

And the point of this whole awful story is supposed to simply be explained in terms of Abraham’s unswerving, unquestioning faithfulness to God?

This is where we preachers need one of these, don’t you think?

How many of you have seen Staples commercials from a few years back with the old “Easy Button”? There were several of them.

  • There was a kid in algebra, getting ready to go to board and work a tough problem, and he pushes the “Easy Button” and gets the answer.
  • There was a doctor getting ready to perform surgery, and as he went in to the surgery room he pushed the “Easy Button.”

If doctors and kids in algebraget an easy button, why not preachers trying to unravel the meaning of disturbing scriptures? Unfortunately, with the scriptures, there’s just no easy button we can push. Some of this is just hard. Some of it is violent. Some of it is confusing. Some of it raises disturbing questions, such as:

  • WHY??? Why would God demand something so heinous as a test of Abraham’s faithfulness? And why would Abraham agree to do it?
  • How could Abraham know for so sure and certain that this was what God wanted him to do? People think they hear the voice of God calling them to do crazy things all the time, right? Think about Jim Jones, or David Koresh. Or the people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center because they believed they’d heard the voice of Allah!

What if it was you orme? What if one of us came to believe that God was speaking to us directly, giving us clear instructions to sacrifice our eldest son on the altar of the Lord? Why, someone would surely call child protective services and our child would be removed from the home! But no, here it is in our Holy Texts, and we are supposed to brush right by the violence and abuse and read it simply as a testament to the strength of Abraham’s faith in God! Am I right?

Have you not heard preachers explain the bad parts away by saying, “Well, that’s the Old Testament. Everything changed with Jesus. God doesn’t ask for sacrifices anymore.”

But I can tell you that like all of you, I’ve read the book, more than once, and having read some things, I have to confess it’s just NOT THAT EASY. We can’t explain these passages away by saying they no longer apply.

It’s not a different God in the Old Testament. It’s the SAME GOD that we all worship, the God of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca, of David and Job and Jeremiah and Jesus and Peter and Paul and Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bill and Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama and you and me, the SAME GOD that we worship is the God who called Abraham to drag his poor, frightened son to this mountain, and tie him up, and build a fire, and prepare to offer him as a sacrifice as a sign of his obedience.

So let me confess: I’ve read numerous commentaries and sermons and had conversations with church people, fellow students and professors and other pastors, and I can’t come up with an easy way out of this.

But perhaps that’s just the point. Just like last week. It is another moment of dissonance in the Bible and we can’t deal with it by simply ignoring our obvious discomfort.

And perhaps that’s the point. Maybe the point of Hagar’s story and Abraham’s story, and indeed the entire Biblical witness from beginning to end, is that faith in God is NOT EASY.

Faith is not a state of being or astate of mind. It is not a simple decision to believe.

Faith is a STATE OF RELATIONSHIP.

Abraham’s faith is part of his relationship with God. And, indeed, faith is part of every relationship. Faith involves both human-to-human relationships and human-to-God relationships.

Life lived in relationship with others inevitably brings tests. We all find ourselves in situations, over and over, where our loyalty is tested, our faith is tested, our commitment is tested.

Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail. What constitutes testing is determined by the nature of the relationship and the expectations we have for it.

As relationships mature and trust is earned over a long period of time, faithful responses tend to become second nature. Yet, even in good, strong, mature relationships, difficult moments of testing may present themselves.

Abraham seems to be in just this kind of a moment.

Here are some things to consider:

  • Perhaps our relationship with God is one in which, like any really strong and meaningful relationship, we should simply expect to be put to the test again and again.
  • Perhaps there are just moments in every single person’s life—absurd, senseless, painful, unexplainable, sometimes tragic, moments—that can be an occasion to turn away from God.
  • Perhaps there is just a part of life that is deep, dark, frightening, and hopeless, through which ALL of we human beings must travel.
  • Perhaps we should stop thinking of God as the one whom we expect to protect us from these things.
  • Perhaps that’s not what trusting God is about. If we only have faith in a God who is some kind of superhero who always protects us and who controls everything that happens on this earth, then eventually we will have to turn away from God.
  • Perhaps what we can learn from this story is that receiving the promises of God does not mean that we are protected from moments when God’s promises get called into question.

In other words, perhaps we should not think of God as our ultimate “EASY BUTTON.”

There is a popular praise and worship song that goes: “Trust God, from the bottom of your heart. Don’t try to figure out everything on your own. Trust God for where your life is going. God is in control.”

I’m not crazy about that song because it seems to oversimplify the reality of the world we live in. Whenever I sing those words I can’t help but think about the times when it feels like God is NOT in control.

  • Like when Hitler and the Nazis killed millions of Jews.
  • Or when planes hit the World Trade Center towers on a beautiful September morning.
  • Or when Tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires and earthquakes wipe out housands of people in mere minutes.
  • Or when I read in the paper about a child being abused, or hear on the news about a person being treated badly because of the color of his skin, or follow the ongoing story of people’s lives in Iraq being destroyed by an evil dictator, and then wars, and now by continuing attacks by insurgent groups.

Abraham raises the knife. He doesn’t reach for the “Easy Button” and he doesn’t seem to know it is a test. It says that it the text, but it doesn’t say that God TOLD Abraham that. So he raises the knife to sacrifice his son. And just in the nick of time, God stops him.

But life tells us that in this relationship of faith, God does NOT always stop bad things from happening to good people, or bad people, for that matter. God causes the rain to fall upon the righteous and unrightous alike. Terrible things happen to people of faith; even people with faith that is very strong.

What is our response is supposed to be? To “have the faith of Abraham.”

To trust.To trust. To trust what? That there’s an Easy Button somewhere?That if we have enough faith, God will protect us?

NO. To trust in the relationship.To trust in the promises of God.

And God’s promise is not that God is going to save us from our pain, or save this world from every evil, or to ALWAYS intervene and provide a ram in the bush before the sacrifice takes place. But rather we CAN trust that God is faithful to us, and we should be faithful to God, through the ups and downs that are part of life, through the good times and the bad times, the easy times and the tough times…

If we can do that, then I really think we are in a new stage in our relationship with God. If we can do that, then maybe we really will have the faith of Abraham.

Epistle Track: Discipleship 101 with the Romans

Romans 6:12-23

If you don’t normally spend a lot of time talking about sin, preaching on the passages from Paul’s letter to the Romans over these weeks will give you an opportunity! I encourage you to take on the challenge as you Paul’s reflections in terms of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

In last week’s Epistle lection Paul dealt with the question of whether disciples should “continue in sin so that grace may abound.” Paul answered with a resoundingNO to that question. In fact, he argued, the life of the disciple should be characterized by righteous living offered in grateful response to what God has done for us in Christ. Through baptism we have become dead to sin and made completely alive to God! John Wesley would call this step in the journey of Christian discipleship“justification.”

I tried to bring the question into sharper focus by way of considering one particular vice that can become a sin over which some people have no power: the consumption of alcohol. I wrote about how the idea of the twelve-step program endorsed by Alcoholics Anonymous begins with a notion that seems to me to be pretty close to Paul’s idea of justification. Whereas in AA the first step is admitting you have a problem, in Paul’s letter to the Romans the first step was accepting God’s offer of grace, recognized in Christian baptism. Justification by faith alone is the first step of Christian discipleship. Itis what sets you free from the power sin has exercised over your life.

The second step for Paul, then, is admitting you have a problem. We might call this second step “repentance,” an active and intentional turning away from the sins that have taken hold of your life. I suggested that everyone has something from which they need to turn away. For some it may be alcohol, but for others it is something else, or many something elses.

As his letter to the Romans continues this week, Paul begins to discuss in greater detail the nature of the sin from which our baptism has freed us. Here Paul is not focused on individual sins or behaviors, but rather sin as a power that stands in opposition to righteousness.And he uses that term that John Wesley loved so much: sanctification.

For Paul the repentance that is needed is not simply the turning away from a single vice or even a list of particular sins, such as the seven deadly ones. Rather, it is a turning away from one way of life in order to clear the way for an entirely different kind of life to take root. We are set free not FROM the particular sins that have taken hold in our lives, but rather we are set free FOR the purpose of living as disciples of Jesus Christ.

In order to preach this text we must grasp that the freedom to which Paul is referring is an entirely new concept, not only for his hearers, but for many of us. It is a freedom that has come as a direct result of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. The ways of sin and death no longer have dominion over us. We have been set free. We have died to our old way of life and been born anew to live in an entirely different way.

When we hear the words “freedom from sin” we may find ourselves getting unnecessarily caught up in the individual sins from which we’d like to be set free. For example, today I told a friend that even as I was writing about sin and our mortal temptations I was resisting the desire to make myself a root beer float! I was imagining sin on a totally individual level and my desire to be free from the temptation to indulge in foods that are not healthy.

But as I continued to read and think about Paul’s words I realized that he was talking about something much greater and more important than simply resisting the temptation to give into something we know is bad for us. He is talking about an entire change in our orientation towards the world around us. He is talking about being free not from something, but being free FOR something.

Free FOR what? Free FOR the purpose of living in joyful obedience to God!

  • What is the difference in being free FROM something as opposed to being free FOR something?
  • Can you think of an example that set a people free FOR something much greater than the needs of any one individual?

John Wesley would say that through God’s prevenient grace (normally acknowledged in Christian baptism) we are saved, set free from, the power of sin to control our lives: We “renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness,reject the evil powers of this world,and repent of (y)our sin” and we “accept the freedom and power God gives you (us) to resist evil, injustice, and oppressionin whatever forms they present themselves.” We are justified by the gift of God’s grace. However, even though we may be saved, our lives are not yet transformed until we have taken the second step of admitting we have a problem. Admitting we have a problem is the beginning point for sanctification.

Sanctification is the process by which Christians become holy, sloughing off their sinful character and taking on the loving character of Christ. According Wesley, sanctification is to be saved from sin so that we may be perfected in love. In other words, we have to be free from sin FOR the purpose of being perfected in love.

The process of sanctification begins at the moment of justification and consists of an inward renewal by the power of the Holy Spirit, a sensing of God’s love, and the production of active love toward all humanity. As we move towards perfection the love of self and world is cast off more and more.