What can we say February 25? Lent 2

    Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16. I wonder if we Christians overthink God’s grace, and don’t bother even trying for “blamelessness,” seeming impossible anyhow. I’m pretty sure God meant “Be blameless.” No surprise then that Abraham “fell on his face,” reminding us of the disciples at the Transfiguration (which weirdly is an alternate Gospel text for this day – but we were just there 2 weeks ago!). Our nobility, our true greatness, is that God bothers to ask for and even expect us to be blameless – or maybe as Wesley put it, “going on to perfection.” The old preacher joke is “If you’re not going on to perfection, where exactly are you going?”

   Abraham is 99… pretty old. Yet still looking for new promise fulfillment, still hearing loving and firm demands from God. What is God asking of the elderly in our churches? And of ourselves as we age – hopefully living into the “as we grow in age, we grow in grace, and in the knowledge of Christ.”

   On this text, Jonathan Sacks provides an eloquent summation: “Faith is the ability to live with delay without losing trust in the promise; to experience disappointment without losing hope, to know that the road between the real and the ideal is long and yet be willing to undertake the journey. That was Abraham’s and Sarah’s faith.”

   Romans 4:13-25 is Paul preaching a sermon on our Genesis text! Paul reiterates my age observation: at age 99, “Abraham grew strong in his faith.” Grew.

   Paul veers toward supersessionism, of course. Sometimes, to insure I’m not tumbling into unwitting anti-Semitism (which A.J. Levine is the master of warning us against), I’ll phone a rabbi friend, tell her/him what I’m thinking, and see what reaction I get.

   “Hoping against hope”: oh my, this origami of contradictory notions! C.E.B. Cranfield gets to the heart of things: “Abraham believed God at a time when it was no longer a human possibility for him to go on hoping. Human hope’s utmost limit had already been reached and passed.” And in a somewhat obscure hymn, Charles Wesley expressed something similar: “In hope, against all human hope, Self-desperate, I believe… Faith, mighty faith, the promise sees, and looks to that alone; laughs at impossibilities, and cries: It shall be done!”

   I wonder if there’s a sermon in “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body” (verse 19). What does the culture say to us about our bodies? Some sleek, fit, curvy ideal? Too fat? Too skinny? Too feeble? Fatigued? Ill? Paul presents us with a counter-cultural, hopeful vision of the body as “the temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 6:19). The preacher can invite people to look down, like right now, at their bodies. Not much? How fantastic: when you consider your own body, your faith can and should be strengthened!

   If your setting allows it, you could reflect on what our society has done to black bodies. Or to women’s bodies. Secular culture might blaze the path for us. Rachel Hollis, TV personality and author of Girl, Wash Your Face, posted an Instagram photo of herself that went viral – with this caption: “I have stretch marks and I wear a bikini because I’m proud of this body and every mark on it… They aren’t scars, ladies, they’re stripes and you’ve earned them.” Our Gospel story ultimately is about a broken, wounded, scarred body, as we see in our Gospel.

   Mark 8:31-38, the very heart of the story of Jesus, the axis on which the plot turns, this dramatic moment at Caesarea Philippi, far to the north, on the border, amidst a warren of temples honoring the fake god, Caesar. It is here that Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem. He’s been a powerful, impressive character, striding across the stage of history up to this point. From now on, he is passive, acted upon, handed over, walking meekly into the teeth of danger to be acted upon.

   W.H. Vanstone, in his lovely book, The Stature of Waiting, suggests that this matches the plot of our lives. We work, we are productive, but then we increasingly are acted upon, handed over to nursing homes or family or the seeming bondage of feeble older age. Jesus’ glory comes in the 2nd half of his story, and therefore he renders our seemingly bad years as our glory. And, we realize Jesus' mission wasn't to impress, heal everybody, and attract a big zealous following with divine razzle-dazzle. He came to save, to love, to lay down his life, to suffer for and with us and redeem us and all creation.

   Chris Green ponders and unwinds the sentence "Peter tries to take Jesus apart." Do it slowly... "I suspect it was earnest and sympathetic, born not of conceit but of misguided compassion. Perhaps, deep down in his bones, Peter sensed something of the weight of Gethsemane and Golgotha, and knew, in a flash, that it would crush them all. Perhaps he saw the shadow of the darkness of that mystery pass over Jesus' face and could not help but try to save his friend."

   No passive spectators allowed here. From the sidelines, we’ll just admire Jesus for suffering “in our place”? Jesus says “Take up your cross and follow me.” Not watch, but make the walk to death row and suffering with me. This “taking up your cross” might sound like bearing your burdens, but that’s not it at all. In the Roman world, if you picked up your cross, you were on death row, you were walking that “green mile” toward your execution.

   Joel Marcus, in his commentary on Mark, wisely refers us to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s thoughts on the gulag: “From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself. ‘My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. . . I no longer have any property whatsoever. . . Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.’ Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble. Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.”

   The logic of the Gospel is illogical to the world, always paradox. Deny yourself to find yourself. Lose your life to save it. Clearly Jesus is utterly uninterested in our niceness, our goodness, our political ideologies or our smug judgments of others. We put our cozy life behind. My property isn’t mine. It’s not what I want to do, and not even what I want to do for God, but what God wants me to do. The preacher errs by saying It might be costly. No, it will be costly – because we follow in a world that is terribly out of sync with Jesus, a culture that does not love the Lord Jesus. The preacher urges this with a soft, plaintive voice and maybe even some tears, never wagging a finger or stridently insisting. We dream that they might actually follow, at least with a few baby steps, to discover that the only thing that is more grievous than the cost of discipleship is the cost of non-discipleship.

   I've preached over time that when Jesus says "Get behind me," that's exactly what a disciple is to do: follow - from behind. I like Green's thought: "Jesus" (by turning away) "moves so that Peter cannot fail to be where he should be! By turning away, Jesus not only prefigures the turn; he actually accomplishes it. And this is always the way of God's wrath. In spite of appearances, the divine judgment is always, always, always, at its heart, only ever mercy. Yes, God turns his back on us. But never to put us in our place. Only ever to help us find it." Boom.