What can we say July 2? 5th after Pentecost

    Romans 6:12-23 feel timely as we approach July 4: freedom isn’t my right to do as I wish, so cherished by Americans, but being set free from slavery to sin, and for obedience! In fact, instead of celebrating my freedom, I grieve my shackled self. In this text, whose topic Michael Gorman calls “the present character of resurrection,” Paul’s psychological insight is striking. Sin isn’t a deed, but a tyrant who “makes you obey their passions” (v. 12)! It’s me, but it feels like some alien in me forcing me against my own will – by crushing the shreds of will I have left – to do its bidding. We are indeed “slaves.” Plaster that on your float for the July 4 parade! “Slaves of America! Your wills are bound.”

   On Ash Wednesday, I told a story about my dog, Abigail. My first parsonage backed up to hundreds of acres of woods. She loved to run and gambol in them. But one day she didn’t come home. I traipsed all over the place, and finally heard her whimpering, crying. Back in the day, somebody had strung up a barbed wire fence. It has tumbled into the leaves and brush over the years – and she was hopelessly entangled. The more she struggled, her lacerations only worsened. All I could do was speak softy, and stroke her gently. Shhh. Be still honey. Be still. You’re ok. Finally she rested, and I could pry the barbs from her flesh, take her in my arms and back home to begin to bind up her wounds. So it is with us and the sin that entraps us. Strive hard to be good! – but you’ll only get more enmeshed. We have to be still, to let God extricate us, and then heal our wounds.

   It’s worth pointing out that Paul isn’t obsessed with narrow personal holiness, the avoidance of sin – although it involves that. It is rather “an appeal for a radical identification with God’s purposes in the world over against powers and forces that oppose God’s purposes and ways” (Gorman). Don’t fritter your self, your energies away. Save up, expend yourself on the things of God.

   Matthew 10:40-42 is short, a bit simplistic – and therein is its power. “Whoever gives a cup of cold water”? Seems easy – but it requires proximity, and tenderness. You don’t drop off a cup of cold water in a collection bin. Think of that pair of corny but still powerful moments in Ben Hur. Judah has been taken captive, and as he trudges miserably, so parched, a shadowy figure gives him a drink. Hint hint: it must be Jesus! Of course, later Jesus is struggling under the weight of the cross – and it is Judah Ben Hur who bolts from the crowd to give him to drink.

   Genesis 22:1-14. Ellen Davis made me laugh: “Here we are, only 22 chapters into the Bible, and already our skin is crawling.” Most listeners will shudder, unknowingly siding with Immanuel Kant, who asserted that if you hear a voice commanding something contrary to moral law, it is not God’s voice. Only a deranged person would harm a child!

   But don’t we sacrifice our children on quite a few altars? Don’t we bind them to the altar of money, or alcohol, or dizzying busyness, or our anxiety or society’s false deities? A conservative might say we sacrifice the unborn, a progressive might say we sacrifice the born but disadvantaged. No shortage of sermon material here! We’re all unwittingly bad parents. Tom (in The Prince of Tides) tells his children, “‘I know we’re screwing you up a little bit every day. If we knew how we were doing it, we’d stop, because we adore you. But we’re parents, and we can’t help it. Do you understand?’ ‘No,’ they agreed in simultaneous chorus. ‘Good. You’re not supposed to understand.’”

   Plenty of sermon fodder here, isn’t there? Bad parents, all of us… and if you’re a Family Guy fan, this hilarious clip about the worst dad in the world elicits a chuckle (but best not to run this video on your worship screens). And yet if it’s to false gods we poor parents sacrifice the children we adore, can’t church correct us, at least somewhat, and steer us in healthier, more spiritually wise directions?

   To me, the simplest homiletical conclusion to be drawn is that Genesis 22, written during the days when Israel’s neighbors did in fact sacrifice their children to placate angry gods, stands as a bold witness to say It shall not be so among you; this will not be done in Israel.

    But is that it? Isn’t there some mystery, some clue here about deeper discipleship, and what the heart of God is like? You can read the text as a one-off: it’s about Abraham, not you and me. There’s no (whew!) “Go thou and do likewise” in every text.

   As a young preacher, I praised Abraham as a shimmering example of total devotion to God. More recently, I’m leaning toward Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who makes a big deal of contrasting Noah, who said not one word in response to God but simply dished up blind obedience (which didn’t impact anybody else!), with Abraham, who talked back to God, who took responsibility, who instead of just letting Sodom and Gomorrah burn fought back, advocating for the citizens there. Why then is Abraham so meek and blindly obedient here? Sacks doesn’t offer us much, except this: “We cherish what we wait for and what we most risk losing… Judaism is a sustained discipline in not taking life for granted.”

   More than any passage in Scripture, Genesis 22 is to be read slowly. Each word bears so much weight, and the emotion – never stated! – is intense. Take your son. Pause… Your only son Isaac. Pause… underlining the ‘only,’ and thus the whole story of barrenness, and then reminding him of his name… which had just meant joyful laughter. Whom you love. Long pause… again, reiterating the obvious, expanding the interior horizon. The pace remains slow, rising early, and as he saddles his donkey.

   When they get to Moriah, he takes the wood, and the fire and knife. Then the text lingers: So they went, both of them together. Pause. Absolutely tender, harrowing. These very words are repeated two verses later. Isaac calls out to him “My father!” (which is how Jesus would teach us to pray). Abraham responds, “Here I am, my son” (echoes of Isaiah 6 but with the tender ‘my son’). I love it that the text never tells us how either of them feels. The intensity is greater than if the mood had been depicted in a bunch of adjectives. We read. We listen. We ponder. So moving. No mansplaining allowed.

   Søren Kierkegaard gifted us with a profound rumination on this text (Fear and Trembling), in which he points out that if Abraham had been heroic, he would have raised the knife and plunged it into his own chest: “He would have been admired; but it is one thing to be admired, and another to be the guiding star which saves the anguished.” Kierkegaard’s best line? “Only he who draws the knife gets Isaac.”

   Ellen Davis, in her wise reflection on this text in Preaching the Luminous Word, speaks of “vulnerability” as “the enabling condition of covenant relationship with God.” Abraham could not be more vulnerable – and he makes himself even more vulnerable by responding “Here I am.” Perhaps he should have run, hidden, or just said No way. “Here I am” is how we always stand before and with God.

   She considers the vulnerability of children in the face of their parents’ faith. How vulnerable was Isaac to his father’s piety? Might this cause the preacher to shudder a bit over the cost to our children of what we think we are doing for God?

   So we have a startling text. Abraham is “tested,” not tempted (as is the case for Jesus in the desert). Russ Reno (in his Brazos/Genesis commentary): “Trials and tests are consistent with divine love. They work against our hopeless hope that our finite powers can see us through. To be tested is to be brought back to reality. It is a spank that awakens us. Trials and tests not only purify us of delusions, but also prepare us for a proper loyalty to the world and its finite goods.”

   The best I can think to ask is What sort of test was the crucifixion for the heart of God the Father? We know Jesus’ cry of dereliction. How did God hear him? What was God’s swirl of emotion when the taunters jeered, “Save yourself”? There is some harrowing in that moment, some unspeakable agony – which words just cannot capture. Rembrandt’s pen and ink profoundly and unforgettably captures Abraham’s face just at the moment he is relieved of his crushing duty, when he who drew the knife actually got Isaac.

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