Sermon for Sunday, July 2nd 2023

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 13], rcl yr a, 2023
Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 13; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42

It was inevitable when we began reading the saga of Abraham and Sarah on June 11 that we would end up here three Sundays later with the binding of Isaac, one of the most repugnant passages in the Hebrew Bible.  None of us can imagine ourselves in the place of Abraham. And what kind of leap of faith is being suggested anyway by this story? Can we realistically consider worshipping a God who would ask us, ask anyone for that matter, to offer a human sacrifice?

Why then, have the authors of the Revised Common Lectionary included the binding of Isaac as one of our Sunday readings from the Old Testament? What is its value?

At the beginning of today’s passage from Genesis, we read “God tested Abraham.”  The intent, this brief statement tells us, is to see what kind of stuff Abraham is made of. My impulse is to ask a question about the writer’s understanding of a God who tests people, but the author is not concerned about God, we understand: this is about Abraham.  And the purpose of this passage in the Hebrew tradition is to teach about Jewish identity and promote the idea of faith in God. 

At the time this story was written down, the Hebrew people were inclined to disbelieve in a God who had an intimate relationship with them. Their own anecdotal experience was that God was missing in action. The kingdoms of Judah and Israel had fallen, and the people, for the most part, had been forced into exile from their homes and their homeland. The God of the ancestors was losing credibility, and stories such as this one, carefully prepared, presented, and debated, were offered as an antidote to their drifting away from faith.  Here, they read, is one whose faith was so great and so radical that he would trust God with the most extreme demand anyone could possibly make of a parent.

And there is a subtext to the story as well. Abraham has a long track record with the God who called and who calls him.  Abraham, himself, left his homeland at God’s bidding, never to return. Abraham and his wife Sarah lived all their married life with the unfulfilled promise, they thought, of giving birth to a child of their own who, they believed, would begin a family that would outnumber the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea. And then, when Sarah was well beyond her childbearing years and Abraham was in his nineties, Isaac was born.  Abraham had been tested over and over and over again, and always hardship, struggle, and doubt turned into blessing.  And so, we listen to his answer to Isaac’s question about the lamb for the burnt offering, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering” and we hear in his answer faith that has been tempered with trial after trial after trial. His reply is, at once, bitterly ironic if we hear through it that Isaac will be the “lamb.”  When, at the end of the account, a ram is caught in a thicket by its horns, we hear Abraham’s answer differently.  The author may have written that “God tested Abraham,” but the “test” changes its value at the end of the story from something abhorrent to something desirable – Abraham’s radical trust and faith in God, even and especially through the greatest of adversities.  The punch-line of the story, “the Lord will provide” was meant for the ears of the exiles in Babylon and elsewhere.  The Lord will provide a way home. 

Are we those exiles? I fear that we are: that our present-day world has become so overturned with hate and violence and greed and economic disparity, with exploitation and oppression, alienation and abandonment, that we feel as if we’re hanging by a thread. We need to be able to believe and say that “The Lord will provide a way home,” but we know that it will be a long and winding road, and we’ll need bread for the journey.
Enter today’s Gospel. Jesus very gently nudges us on our way, orienting us toward discipleship, toward walking that long and winding road in faith. The image he uses is of hospitality and the word he uses over and over is “welcome”. It is a teaching moment, but he is not being prescriptive. Rather, he is being descriptive in the hope, I suspect, that his gentle invitation and our welcome response will characterize the quiet grace and strength of the gospel itself. We take with us the bread he has given – his holy example, his life, ministry, suffering, death and resurrection, knowing that it will transform us from exiles into people like Abraham and Sarah. And we know that it will be enough: that as people of great faith, even though we will be tested, we will address and defeat all those impossibilities that have overturned our world.

The good news of Jesus’ welcome is that it is our invitation to discipleship; that as individuals, and together as we form his church, our ministry is his ministry and his ministry is our ministry. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me,” he teaches, “and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”

JFB

At the time this story was written down, the Hebrew people were inclined to disbelieve in a God who had an intimate relationship with them. Their own anecdotal experience was that God was missing in action. The kingdoms of Judah and Israel had fallen, and the people, for the most part, had been forced into exile from their homes and their homeland. The God of the ancestors was losing credibility, and stories such as this one, carefully prepared, presented, and debated, were offered as an antidote to their drifting away from faith.  Here, they read, is one whose faith was so great and so radical that he would trust God with the most extreme demand anyone could possibly make of a parent.

And there is a subtext to the story as well. Abraham has a long track record with the God who called and who calls him.  Abraham, himself, left his homeland at God’s bidding, never to return. Abraham and his wife Sarah lived all their married life with the unfulfilled promise, they thought, of giving birth to a child of their own who, they believed, would begin a family that would outnumber the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea. And then, when Sarah was well beyond her childbearing years and Abraham was in his nineties, Isaac was born.  Abraham had been tested over and over and over again, and always hardship, struggle, and doubt turned into blessing.  And so, we listen to his answer to Isaac’s question about the lamb for the burnt offering, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering” and we hear in his answer faith that has been tempered with trial after trial after trial. His reply is, at once, bitterly ironic if we hear through it that Isaac will be the “lamb.”  When, at the end of the account, a ram is caught in a thicket by its horns, we hear Abraham’s answer differently.  The author may have written that “God tested Abraham,” but the “test” changes its value at the end of the story from something abhorrent to something desirable – Abraham’s radical trust and faith in God, even and especially through the greatest of adversities.  The punch-line of the story, “the Lord will provide” was meant for the ears of the exiles in Babylon and elsewhere.  The Lord will provide a way home. 

Are we those exiles? I fear that we are: that our present-day world has become so overturned with hate and violence and greed and economic disparity, with exploitation and oppression, alienation and abandonment, that we feel as if we’re hanging by a thread. We need to be able to believe and say that “The Lord will provide a way home,” but we know that it will be a long and winding road, and we’ll need bread for the journey.
Enter today’s Gospel. Jesus very gently nudges us on our way, orienting us toward discipleship, toward walking that long and winding road in faith. The image he uses is of hospitality and the word he uses over and over is “welcome”. It is a teaching moment, but he is not being prescriptive. Rather, he is being descriptive in the hope, I suspect, that his gentle invitation and our welcome response will characterize the quiet grace and strength of the gospel itself. We take with us the bread he has given – his holy example, his life, ministry, suffering, death and resurrection, knowing that it will transform us from exiles into people like Abraham and Sarah. And we know that it will be enough: that as people of great faith, even though we will be tested, we will address and defeat all those impossibilities that have overturned our world.

The good news of Jesus’ welcome is that it is our invitation to discipleship; that as individuals, and together as we form his church, our ministry is his ministry and his ministry is our ministry. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me,” he teaches, “and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”

JFB