SERMON, July 20, 2008 10 Pentecost

Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30

Perhaps you know someone who is adopted or an adoptive parent; perhaps you yourself were adopted or an adoptive parent. Not long ago a friend told me the story of how he’d accompanied his daughter on a trip to China to complete the adoption of the little girl who is now his granddaughter. He told me of their log trip there, the paperwork, the bureaucracy, their anxiety in dealing with the authorities and all the details, and their great joy when finally the three of them boarded the place to come home.

You don’t have to go to China to adopt a child of course; our world is filled with children in need of parents, yearning to be adopted, to become a part of a loving family, to know the security of belonging.

Paul addresses the Gentile church in Rome and us. He uses the metaphor of adoption to underscore our relationship with God in Christ. He tells us that we who are led by the Spirit are children of God, and like children are heirs of God—recipients of the gifts of that relationship—members of the family. When we cry “Abba Father!” he says it is God’s Spirit with our spirit that reveals that who we are most deeply, most surely, are God’s children. God’s love for us—desire for us—longing for us to be united—is echoed in the lengths to which adoptive parents go to adopt a child—the journeying, the sacrificing, the giving, the opening of self, of heart, of arms—are all a faint but vivid echo of God in Christ Jesus come among us. We can’t help but hear those baptismal words Jesus heard as he came up out of the waters of the Jordan, “You are my son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

It is vital that we know who we are and whose we are because we live in in between times. Paul looks around and sees a world filled with pain and division. There is a sense that things are askew. There is suffering. not everyone says “yes” to their adoption. People continue to seek after their own self-focused ways. They forget who they are.It is a time like that which Jesus describes in his little parable about the weeds and the wheat. The in between time: the wheat is in the ground and growing, but the weeds are there mixed in with the wheat.

Paul reminds us that we are a part of something larger. We are a part of God’s creation. We are creatures of God. And our longing for adoption, our longing to live fully into our true selves as children of God is matched by the groaning of creation. We groan together.

God knows that whatever this meant in Paul’s day, today this groaning creation in bondage to decay, subjected to futility is agonizing to hear. It has become a roar. We live in a time when we have become acutely aware of our own complicity in the pain and the groaning of creation—the groaning of God’s creation—at least in this little corner of it we call earth. The biblical narrative suggests that the fall—the story told as humans in the garden eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—however we interpret that story—has ramifications throughout creation. It affects not just humanity but the other creatures and the created order itself. Perhaps today we have some insight about the story we lacked before. perhaps today we see how we humans have misunderstood our calling, misunderstood our identity, forgotten our connection to the rest of creation—forgotten our own creatureliness. Perhaps we have misunderstood our identity as creatures made in the image of God. Perhaps we have misunderstood dominion to mean domination. We have wandered far from our calling to be caretakers: to care for God’s creation as God would care for it. We have lived as though creation were made for us, and not for God.

To remember who we are is to remember that we are part of God’s creation—is to remember not only God’s words in the story of creation: “It is good,” but also to hold to the vision of God’s peaceable kingdom described in Isaiah 11: The creatures and the created world we know living together in harmony, glorifying God.

Paul says that creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. One translation puts it that creation waits “on tiptoe” for that revealing—for that time when we grow into the fullness of the people we were created to be—for that time when we live into our baptismal identity.

These are hard things to think about. Especially perhaps for us: we in the West who have enjoyed the benefits of these ways of living that we now know have come at a cost: a high cost to creation, to the other creatures that inhabit the earth with us. I was in the Seattle area recently and drove through a beautiful park-like forested area where the corporate offices of one of the big lumber companies are. Then I was driven to the Mt. Rainier National Forest and passed through miles and miles of once forested areas—stripped bare. I could hear the groaning of creation and my own groans too. . . I preach these words to you and they are written on paper. My home is built of wood. I know these things. This is real. I’d prefer not to think of it. Not to listen to the groans. There is a part of me that prefers not to consider what I need to give up to help with the repair. There is a part of me that prefers not to consider the changes I need to make to reorient my ways to God’s ways—to become more deeply God’s child. I’d prefer not to suffer with Christ—not to endure the suffering of the present time for the glory to be revealed.

But creation groans and I cannot stop my ears to it. In truth we groan along with it, and long to be set free. Paul suggests that these are the groans of birthing: birth pangs. He tells us that as we live with these first fruits of the Spirit we live in hope: hope for things unseen, unimaginable perhaps. We put our trust in God, in the Spirit of God already at work in us and in creation and we live into hope.

God the creator is still at work—bringing new life—setting us free to become who we were created to be—the God who goes to any length to adopt us, to make us heirs, is at work in the midst of our groans. You and I are a part of God’s creation—a creation made not for us—but for the glory of God. That glory will be revealed. AMEN. Painting: The Garden of Eden by Roelandt Savery, Antwerp

SERMON, July 6 8 Pentecost

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

I have a bulletin board hanging in my work space in my little condo. The other day I saw a small note that’s been there for months. My granddaughter handed it to me one day when she got tired of waiting for me to finish my work on the computer. She’s eight. It reads, “Dear Mamaw, I love you. Pleas play with me out here. Love, Sawyer” I keep it as a reminder—not only of my calling to be a grandmother and the precious relationship that brings—but also as an echo of God’s invitation to me. “I love you. Please play with me.”

In this morning’s lesson Jesus points out how the people of his day (and of ours) are like children—children who invite others to play, but instead of playing—they refuse. They no doubt stand at the edges and criticize or make excuses or ignore the invitations. It’s a poignant little passage. Jesus describes the children—some playing the flute as at a wedding, some wailing as at a funeral. The others refuse to join in. Perhaps like children today who play house imitating the activities of their families.

He talks about John the Baptist and himself. How different they are—one the ascetic—neither eating nor drinking. Preaching the gospel of repentance and cleansing. Wandering in the desert, seeking God in letting go. The other eating and drinking with sinners and tax collectors—those who didn’t follow the religious practices of his day—outsiders. Preaching the kingdom of God come among us, celebrating, rejoicing in God’s love without limits.

Both men of God. Very different. Both rejected. Ridiculed, Subjects of violence. Ultimately of death. God’s invitations to the fullness of life—invitations to play delivered in two very different ways—offering two paths to relationship. Both ignored. Rejected. Dismissed.

One way to enter this little passage is to think of it as describing paths of prayer. The one (via positiva) emphasizing abundance, the incredible love of God spilling out, energizing and making new. The path to God through praise and thanksgiving, through liturgy of song, through adoration and joy, through offering oneself wholly to the Holy. The other (via negativa) through letting go—of material possessions, status, words even, seeking the God beyond God to be found in emptying. The offering of oneself stripped bare, opened wide through the process of letting go. Both of these traditions handed down to us for our benefit—invitations to seek a deeper relationship with God as our forbearers have. Actually, many have followed not one but both paths—or some combination of the two as they have sought to say yes to the invitation to play. Yes to the freedom, yes to the fullness of life offered by God.

Jesus reminds us though that in spite of the invitations many will be dismissive, rejecting and critical: “He’s crazy,” “He’s a drunk and he hangs out with all the wrong people.” Others simply stand at the side and refuse to respond. No RSVPs from them. They’ll just take life as it is… full of labor and heavy burdens. Lots of worries and concerns. The sense of powerlessness. A kind of dread. We live in an age of anxiety.

In the second part of this little reading, we come to the heart of the matter: Jesus reminds us of his intimate relationship with God. His purpose in is life to share that with us, to invite us into the same kind of relationship. The invitation seems to be totally opaque to the powers that be—to the so-called wise and intelligent. They don’t get it at all. The little ones, the infants—they are the ones who can grasp the meaning of the invitation. The unbounded love that pours out from God seeking always to find us. The ones without power—they get it. Maybe because they have already been stripped—already let go. They can receive the invitation with open arms and hearts.

The passage ends with Jesus’ direct invitation, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden. I will give you rest.” Lord, knows even in a retirement community we can understand this. To labor in Jesus’ day, in Matthew’s day, was to be at work in the midst of a huge system of economic and political power that demanded much and gave little in return to most folks. Labor was labor under the Roman system: heavy taxes, tributes, forced labor, military threat, produce sent one way on those incredible Roman roads—to Rome. To be heavy laden was to bear the burden of this system in your everyday life. To feel its weight, its oppressiveness. The no end in sight-edness of it all. Jesus uses the words of the empire to describe a different kind of realm—the realm of God. As he does so, no one can escape the truth of their current situation—the “real” world.

We may not be living in an identical real world—but God knows we have our own heavy burdens. Our days are filled with signs and portents: fires all over the state—and it’s only the beginning of the season. Gas prices high and getting higher—already affecting our so-called life styles, forcing us to pick and choose where we never noticed we were making choices. Water scarce and getting scarcer. Food too. Hunger is on the rise all over the world. Basic foods are too expensive or too scarce. The market continuing its inexorable drop. Retirement incomes—at least mine—dropping along with it. Storms, floods, typhoons, earthquakes, global warming. You name it. We live in an age of anxiety. An age of heavy burdens.

To all of this Jesus says, Come to me, I will give you rest. The rest he refers to is NOT a nap—much as we might feel in need of one. Rather it is most certainly the rest of God’s salvation—the achievement of God’s will. That’s how the word rest is used most often in the Scriptures. The rest that comes with the accomplishment of God’s will. A part of the peace of God that passes all understanding. That sense of rightness that causes you to relax, be at peace with yourself and with others.

To come to Jesus and take up his yoke is to find yourself in God’s realm—not the empire’s. In the Bible the word yoke most often describes the power of the empire or the power of God. We Americans don’t even like to think of yokes (not even egg yolks since we learned about cholesterol!). We pride ourselves in our independence.

Not that we really are independent. We all of us yoke ourselves to one thing or another. Maybe our jobs, our reputation, our hobbies, our possessions, our addictions… the list goes on and on. To who and what am I yoked? It’s a question worth pondering.

Jesus invites us to yoke ourselves with his yoke. I image this as one of those side-by-side yokes. You know where two oxen are working together to get the job done. Two are brought together in relationship to work together, support each other. Now maybe you think we don’t have much to offer Jesus if we are yoked beside him. But God’s invitation is offered in hopes of a response. In hopes of people not standing to the side and watching, saying nothing—preferring to live with their labor and burdens intact; in hopes of people not criticizing and responding with violence. God’s hope is that love will be answered with love.

The one who offers his yoke is gentle and humble in heart. Not a tyrant, not an oppressor, but a compassionate one. This makes all the difference. To learn from Jesus is to learn that his realm--God’s realm-- is not about lording it over another, but about service, not about violence and social divisions, its not about scarcity, its about abundance; about boundaryless love and forgiveness. It is about living in relationship with God.

My yoke is “easy” says Jesus in our translation. But in fact it isn’t. More accurately the word means something more like good and kind. My yoke is good and kind. Not easy. There will be upset and criticism. Jesus was judged for extending the invitation to the table to those who had been left outside. So we may expect the same. The very notion that the invitation might be to “come and play” is a scandal to some. God is always about very serious business you know. But the word play hints at the freedom and the rest that are ours when we say yes to the invitation. Yes to God’s love. Yes.

“Dear people, I love you. Please play with me. Love, God.”

SERMON, June 29 7 Pentecost

Genesis 22:1-14; Matthew 10:40-42

The Binding of Isaac. One of the most horrifying of Old Testament stories—When you come to church it isn’t to hear this kind of story, is it? For some people this kind of lesson is just what made them leave the church, never to return. This picture of a sick God who demands the death of a precious child is a scandal in an age when we are more than ever aware of the rampant abuses of children in our own country and throughout the world. This picture of Abraham—the so-called father of our faith—accepting the words from God, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love and get you going to the land of Moriah, and offer him there….” accepting these words without argument. Abraham, who once argued against God’s determination to punish Sodom—argued and argued that God’s proposed actions were not really very Godish! Now without argument he takes his son and starts out on the journey. It’s enough to make you throw up—or run screaming out the doors. What kind of God is this? What kind of faith is Abraham’s? Is God a God who tests us? Is God a God who would call a person to kill his own child? What on earth does it mean to be obedient—to be faithful to God? How could I trust a God like this one? Good grief.

The Bible is a strange book. There is no getting around it. And Hebrew Scriptures have some hard stories in them—very hard stories. Especially hard if you are a woman, for example. There is violence. There is judgment. There are things described we’d rather not see—not hear about. And so some Christians I know just don’t read the Old Testament. They find everything they need to know in the New Testament. Others quote the Old Testament injunctions about morality—picking and choosing the parts they find significant. They read the Old Testament to find guidance for behavior. Others find some passages worthwhile (some of the psalms, the story of Ruth, the prophets perhaps…) but generally they judge the Old Testament to be morally deficient somehow.

In truth the New Testament cannot be read or understood without the Old. Not only was the Old Testament Jesus’ Bible and the Scripture he quoted, but Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, his teaching and healing, his life were interpreted—were understood by his friends and followers in the context of the Old Testament. That context, those stories, those poems, those insights formed the bedrock on which the story of Jesus was told. Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 couldn’t be described without people remembering the manna in the wilderness. His healing of the little girl-- without the image of Elijah coming to mind. His calming of the sea --without the parting of the sea. His crucifixion --without this hard story of God and Abraham and the binding of Isaac.

But to enter stories such as this one requires us to get past our emotional horror I think. I can get stuck there. And I have, let me tell you. Stuck thinking about this horrifying God who would ask such a thing. Stuck being terrified that God might ask such a thing of me. Stuck wondering what about Sarah—wasn’t it her only son? Stuck wondering about Ishmael—Abraham had just sent him away to the wilderness because Sarah asked him to. What is it with Abraham anyway?

This story and others in Scripture don’t answer all my questions. They never do. They raise a lot of questions—and they make me uncomfortable. They leave me on the precipice. Maybe they are meant to do just that.

To get anything out of a story like this one—to connect it to my own life and our corporate life today requires a lot from me. It asks that I read it slowly and ponder it in context. It requires that I accept its strangeness. Its remoteness. That I be willing to ask if indeed it can have anything of value for me. Can it tell me anything about what it’s like to be involved with God? To be in relationship with God? Does the God of Abraham have anything in common with the God of Jesus?

One thing we can say about this story is that God is a God who tests and a God who provides—both. Abraham is caught somewhere in the middle of that tension. It reminds me of the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus taught us to pray for God’s provision “Give us our daily bread.” and also that line about “lead us not into temptation—which is also translated as “do not bring us to the test.” Don’t bring us to those moments where we have to choose. I talked a bit about this last week—all the choices that fill our days and how they relate to the underneath it all choice of whose dream do we choose? God’s? or some other. God, for Jesus, is a God who tests and provides. Both.

Isaac represents the person, the dream, the promise that Abraham had been seeking for some 25 or so years. He’d had another Get you going call from God that started his whole involvement with God. “Get you going from your country, your kindred, and your father’s house and to the land I will show you.” That was perhaps the first test—and no light thing either. This leaving of center—life then found its meaning in family and place. And Abram got up and went, just as he does now. Isaac represents God’s promise of descendents numbered like the stars. “ I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”

This test perhaps is not about whether Abraham will kill his own child, but about whether Abraham has come to love the gift more than the giver. We do that—you and I. We all of us have gifts we’ve received that we come to believe we cannot live without. Family, spouse, partner, home, power, wealth, reputation, job, children, life’s work—it’s easy to forget the giver and focus on the gift. Maybe this story is a reminder to me that there is really no gift more important than the giver. The One who provides. I forget sometimes—and begin to think and live like I am the provider. Me.

Part of the shock of God’s testing of Abraham is that God needs to know something God doesn’t know. This is weird isn’t it? We like to think of God as knowing everything, but in this story God tests Abraham and at that crucial point in the story the angel blurts out (on God’s behalf) “Now I know!” words that escape our lips when we’ve seen something revelatory—figured out something we didn’t understand before. “Now I know that you fear God since you have not withheld your son, your only son from me.” Fear here doesn’t mean scared of—fear is the respect, the honor, the awe one has for the divine. To fear God is to put God at the center.

The whole story starts with the strange words, “After these things…” which we can’t be sure what things it’s referring to, really. Maybe all the ways in which human beings since creation have been drawing back from God—from the garden, to the murder of Abel, to the events after the flood, the tower of Babel—you name it. Those were things to remember. Or maybe the things are Abraham’s actions all these many years, keeping the faith, and doubting, trusting God and trying to do it his own way, trying to please Sarah, all of it. Maybe after all these things God wasn’t quite sure that pinning divine hopes on this one human being was such a good idea after all. The covenant with Abraham was built on love really—and love is a risky thing. God is vulnerable in this story—just as Isaac and Abraham are. God’s provided and tracked all this way with Abraham and God wants to know if Abraham has given himself to God.

Which brings us to Jesus. There are references in the New Testament to how Jesus crucifixion was like this story of the binding of Isaac. How God did not refuse to give even his own son to death. The danger of these comparisons I think is that we get stuck again in the notion that God demands the death of a child. This is not what the crucifixion is about. The story of Abraham is not so much about the death of a child as the willingness to recognize that whatever the gift is it is not the center—the giver is. And whatever is let go off, God is still to be trusted as making provision for us.

The crucifixion is NOT about God demanding the death of a child. It is about God’s love risking all to be with us. The place where the comparison speaks to us today is I think in the vulnerability of God. God who tests Abraham, not knowing. And the God in Christ Jesus virtually naked--vulnerable to human choosing and abuse. These are images that stretch our comprehension and imagination. God so vulnerable as to enter life to its very depths death on a cross. God so loving as to risk our response in the flesh.

Perhaps this is why Jesus in the gospel of Matthew celebrates those who give even a cup of water to his followers. "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me," he says. God awaits our welcome. Always.

___________________ See the following: Brueggeman, Walter, Genesis, John Knox Press, 1982. Davis, Ellen F. Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament, Cowley Publications, 2001. May, James L., "'Now I Know' An Exposition of Genesis 22:1-19 and Matthew 26:36-46" Theology Today (I don't have the issue).