Second Sunday in Lent
Service Date:
8 March, 2009
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Last week we started to think about God's promise to us. Do you remember what symbol we used to think about that promise? [a rainbow] What did I say that the rainbow means for us about God's promise? [it's forever]
Well, this week we go back to the other end of time, to the beginning of the story we know about God choosing a particular person, then a particular family to work with. That doesn't mean God didn't choose anyone else, but this is the story we know about as Christians.
And of course we know about our own family stories too. I always thought my father was an only child, but then I discovered he'd had an older step-brother. My grandfather had been married twice, and the son from his first marriage died young. The way my father talked about him, he hero-worshipped this older brother, and was really sad when he died. But not everyone gets on with their family, and family trees can be very complicated affairs.
Who here has brothers or sisters? Do you get on? Does anyone like my dad have step-relations or adopted children in the family? Then we know something about the story of Abraham and his family, the story we've just heard a bit about this morning, from the inside of your own family life.
Abraham and Sarah were married for years and years, and they'd given up hoping for children. So Sarah said, Why don't you take my maid Hagar as a wife too? She can have children for you. Well, Hagar had a son, and they called him Ishmael. That was good news. But God promised Sarah that she'd have a son too. The way we read this story in the Hebrew Bible, it was Sarah's son Isaac who ended up the important one, the one God promised to look after, the one whose family ended up as the Jewish people. The way we Christians retell that story in the New Testament, we end up as Abraham's children too, because through Jesus we've been adopted into God's people.
But the way Muslims tell the story, Ishmael was the son God had promised Abraham, and Ishmael's descendants ended up as the Muslim people.
So Jews, Christians and Muslims - we all tell the story about Abraham and his family, we all remember God's promise made to one particular person, and then to his family. The snag is, we all tell it as though we're the only ones who get God's promise. And it's the same problem with the land God promised to Abraham and to his descendants in our reading. Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe, from the reading we've just heard, that God's promise to Abraham was meant for them only - and of course, when you get brothers or even sisters competing for their inheritance, you get big trouble.
So what can we do instead? How can we make Abraham's family tree into a blessing, not a curse? Well, according to an earlier bit of Abraham's story, God promised that his family would turn into a blessing for all peoples. Not just for Jews. Not just for Christians. For everyone. And when children in a family share, then there is peace and happiness. So when we remember the family tree of Abraham and Sarah, our ancestors in the faith, let's remember God's promise, right from the very beginning of the story, to be our God. But let's remember too that being God's people means being a blessing to everyone.
Last week we started to think about God's promise to us. Do you remember what symbol we used to think about that promise? [a rainbow] What did I say that the rainbow means for us about God's promise? [it's forever]
Well, this week we go back to the other end of time, to the beginning of the story we know about God choosing a particular person, then a particular family to work with. That doesn't mean God didn't choose anyone else, but this is the story we know about as Christians.
And of course we know about our own family stories too. I always thought my father was an only child, but then I discovered he'd had an older step-brother. My grandfather had been married twice, and the son from his first marriage died young. The way my father talked about him, he hero-worshipped this older brother, and was really sad when he died. But not everyone gets on with their family, and family trees can be very complicated affairs.
Who here has brothers or sisters? Do you get on? Does anyone like my dad have step-relations or adopted children in the family? Then we know something about the story of Abraham and his family, the story we've just heard a bit about this morning, from the inside of your own family life.
Abraham and Sarah were married for years and years, and they'd given up hoping for children. So Sarah said, Why don't you take my maid Hagar as a wife too? She can have children for you. Well, Hagar had a son, and they called him Ishmael. That was good news. But God promised Sarah that she'd have a son too. The way we read this story in the Hebrew Bible, it was Sarah's son Isaac who ended up the important one, the one God promised to look after, the one whose family ended up as the Jewish people. The way we Christians retell that story in the New Testament, we end up as Abraham's children too, because through Jesus we've been adopted into God's people.
But the way Muslims tell the story, Ishmael was the son God had promised Abraham, and Ishmael's descendants ended up as the Muslim people.
So Jews, Christians and Muslims - we all tell the story about Abraham and his family, we all remember God's promise made to one particular person, and then to his family. The snag is, we all tell it as though we're the only ones who get God's promise. And it's the same problem with the land God promised to Abraham and to his descendants in our reading. Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe, from the reading we've just heard, that God's promise to Abraham was meant for them only - and of course, when you get brothers or even sisters competing for their inheritance, you get big trouble.
So what can we do instead? How can we make Abraham's family tree into a blessing, not a curse? Well, according to an earlier bit of Abraham's story, God promised that his family would turn into a blessing for all peoples. Not just for Jews. Not just for Christians. For everyone. And when children in a family share, then there is peace and happiness. So when we remember the family tree of Abraham and Sarah, our ancestors in the faith, let's remember God's promise, right from the very beginning of the story, to be our God. But let's remember too that being God's people means being a blessing to everyone.
Hymns:
R&S 121 is based on the Hebrew Yigdal, a 12th-century statement of faith about the nature of God, traditionally chanted between cantor and congregation in the synagogue to the tune we are using this morning, Leoni. The evangelical preacher Thomas Olivers turned it into a Christian hymn which would no longer be suitable for a Jewish congregation, but owes much to its original.R&S 553 also remembers that our Christian family tree begins with Abraham and Sarah (whereas Muslims remember Hagar as their mother in the faith). The tune Aurelia is known for the hymn ‘The Church's one foundation', though it was originally written for ‘Jerusalem the golden', hence its name (Aurelia = golden).
How urgent is the summons reflects on the realities of Jesus' call to take up our cross and follow him. The tune Alford was written by John Bacchus Dykes in 1875 (one wonders whether his parents approved of alcohol).
R&S 603 was written by Timothy Dudley-Smith in 1967 for the centenary of Scripture Union, though then it was sung to Sibelius' tune Finlandia. The tune Lord of the Years was written for it by Michael Baughen, a coworker at the Church Pastoral Aid Society.
Sermon:
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:23-31; Mark 8:31-38; Romans 4:13-25It seems a long, long way from God's covenant promise to Abraham of blessing to that dark warning Jesus gives his friends in Mark's Gospel about the suffering he must undergo, and the cross he expects his disciples to shoulder too. And it seems a long way from either into the lives we live today. Is there a thread that will lead us through this maze of readings and bring us safe through? Maybe we can begin with the idea of trust.
Trust seems in short supply just now. Bankers don't trust their customers not to default on loans, so they don't lend money to us to buy houses or to help our businesses grow. They don't trust one another not to pass on our bad debts, so they don't lend money to one another. They don't trust the government either, because they are starting to protest against huge bonuses paid out to reward failure. And we return the compliment by failing to trust them. Being a banker just now must feel rather like being a used-car salesman or an estate agent in pre-credit-crunch times - only politicians are seen as equally untrustworthy!
Sometimes learning to trust is a matter of time. Our Contact Centre works because separated parents trust us to keep their child safe while contact with the estranged parent is maintained; sometimes, after years, enough trust has been re-established for the parents, though still separated, to be able to arrange visits without the Contact Centre acting as a go-between.
Sometimes it feels very risky to trust without guarantees of outcome. When God told Abraham to leave home, family, everything he knew and go off into the unknown, it must have taken a lot of trust to obey. Being told you'll father nations must also be a bit hard to take seriously when you and your wife are both past that sort of thing. Frankly, I think Sarah showed even more trust, given that she didn't have any direct experience of God's promises to go on. But they did it. Trust wavered sometimes; they tried out short-cuts which ended up being long ways round, like the birth of Ishmael, through using Hagar as a surrogate mother. But Sarah and Abraham never gave up on God, even if they did laugh disbelievingly from time to time, as God's latest idea was revealed.
According to Paul, writing about the whole thing afterwards in his letter to Rome, God took Abraham's trust in God as a sign of his good standing with God, even before he obeyed God's command to be circumcised as a sign of the covenant between them. The technical phrase is ‘Faith was reckoned to Abraham as righteousness', but that comes to the same thing.
The restoration of trust and relationship between God and people was Jesus' concern, too. In his time, as in ours, people were tempted to use what power they had against others, both personally and politically. That misuse of their abilities, that sin, drove a wedge between God and people, as they tried to meet their needs through money, sex or status, or, if those were beyond their reach, by destruction. But that sort of strategy doesn't work. You can never get enough, by whatever means, to still the little voice inside which doesn't believe you're worth anything. The only way Jesus could unanswerably show people that we were worth loving was by enduring the worst that we could do to him: by having his love for us tested to destruction on the cross; and, through his resurrection, showing that not even death could destroy it.
If you trust someone that much, and they let you down, the disappointment will be correspondingly severe. Jesus still puts himself in that position with us every day of our lives, as we decide whether or not we want to be his friends, whether or not we will trust God and follow him.
And if we do follow Sarah and Abraham in trusting God - however wobbly our trust - we will find, as they did, that the consequences challenge our faith further. For if we take Jesus seriously, we discover that he calls us to take up our own cross and follow his example. But what, in practice, can that mean for us in 21st century Sheffield, with no Roman authorities ready to nail us up, and not even a death penalty in sight?
That's a question that takes a lifetime to work through, but here are three pointers to start your thinking. Firstly, Jesus doesn't call us to be doormats. The point of shouldering our cross is not to be masochistic, that the more we hurt, the more Jesus loves us. We cannot pay for God's love by our own suffering.
Nor, I believe, does Jesus call us to be martyrs for the sake of good publicity. Recently some Christians in the public eye have started to ask whether we are being unfairly penalised for expressing our faith, with the nurse recently reprimanded for offering to pray for her patient being given as one example. But I don't think we Christians should demand special privileges. Rather, as Jesus' followers, we should support fair treatment for everyone, whatever their faith, because God loves all people.
What then does Jesus mean when he asks us to take up our crosses and follow him? Well, the cross was an instrument of social control, used to execute those who rebelled against Rome, so if we are to carry our own crosses, it will indeed be because someone objects to the way we live our faith. But if not outrage that Christianity is under attack, what should our reaction be? Simply this: that when we are hurt, instead of passing that hurt on, we choose to exercise forgiveness. That cannot mean, obviously, that we pretend not to be hurt, or not to have enemies - the God of truth wants us to be honest. But it does mean that instead of retaliating, however much someone's actions deserve it, the buck stops with us. If that policy were pursued within families, or churches, squabbles would stop as soon as they began. If that policy had been pursued in the Holy Land, millions of lives would not have been lost to religious violence.
But can we exercise such superhuman love? Speaking personally, I know I am incapable of it. But we are not left alone to wrestle with our inability to love as Jesus loves, to be tested, as Jesus was tested, to destruction. I direct us back to this morning's psalm, only the second half of which was set for reading today. The very beginning may be familiar: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It is Jesus' cry from the cross, the beginning of a lament which, as he knew, ends up as a hymn of praise, addressing God in the midst of the congregation, among brothers and sisters, as the one who delivers us from trouble. It is God, who enabled Sarah and Abraham to act on God's promises, who will help us, this Lent and beyond, if we trust God and to follow in Jesus' footsteps: to the cross, to the tomb, and even beyond death to new life.
