ben | 
03 29th, 2009| 
A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on the fifth Sunday of Lent
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
Next Sunday morning we begin the most important week of the Christian year. Holy Week, we call it, because that is the obvious and most true label possible. The week itself tells the story of the last events in Jesus’ life and earthly ministry. We call these events the ‘Passion’ because while it isn’t the obvious label it is still the most true. Twice during Holy Week we will read aloud the story of these last days as told in the Gospels. First on Palm Sunday, and then again on Good Friday, we retell the Gospel accounts of the passion—long passages of the most sacred of scriptures.
On Palm Sunday each year we read from the Gospel of that year. Mark is our text this year, until in Advent we switch to Luke, and so next Sunday we will read aloud the passion according to Mark. On Good Friday of each year we read the same story from the Gospel of John. The simple explanation for this is that it would redundant to have the same story exactly both times; it would be repetitive to read the long story of Jesus’ passion in exactly the same words two times over. The more complicated reason we do this is that John’s version of this story is very different from the others’, and that despite that difference, all versions are true.
This year the distinction is sharp. Mark and John are perhaps the most different of the four canonical Gospels. In Mark’s story, Jesus is most human. In John’s, most divine. We get a preview of that divine approach to crucifixion in today’s Gospel portion. In the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) Jesus asks that God spare him from the suffering to come. Though determined to do God’s will, Jesus asks this very human question. In John’s Gospel the question is purely rhetorical: “what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”
If it is difficult for you to imagine a merely human person who can face torture and death with such equanimity, don’t worry. Surely it is equally difficult to imagine that this merely human being was also a divine human being—was also God who was to die. John’s perspective on Jesus, while more difficult for most of us to accept than the others, gives us the ability to hear from Jesus on the why of these events. Why must Jesus die in this way? What is the point? John offers not scripture quotes from the Psalms nor prophecies fulfilled from Isaiah. John offers explanation right from Jesus’ mouth: “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” I admit this is far from crystal clear, but at least it is a different perspective—a new way into understanding what God is doing in this Holy Week to come.
Before seeking more clarity from the Gospel text this week, let us ponder the readings from Jeremiah and Hebrews, which may enlighten our search. Jeremiah speaks of covenant this morning. Two weeks ago we also spoke of covenant, of the new covenant that God was forging with Abraham. Unlike the previous covenant that God had made with Noah, the covenant with Abraham would require Abraham’s participation. While our text left it out, we determined that this participation took the form of circumcision, a sign of utter commitment if I’ve ever heard of one. This covenant stood for hundreds of years, until God forged yet another covenant with the people of Israel, this time through Moses. If Abraham’s covenant was marked by circumcision, Moses’ covenant was marked by two stone tablets, upon which God wrote, through Moses, the laws by which God’s people would know their God. These ten commandments were our topic last Sunday.
Now we come to this final Sunday of Lent and again we speak of covenant. Jeremiah speaks with the prophetic voice and announces the coming of yet another new covenant. And what will be the sign for this covenant? It seems that this covenant shall be internal. No longer will God’s laws be written on stone, but upon the very hearts of the people. There will no longer be a need for teaching God’s laws to one another, because all people will have God imprinted within them. As Christians we hear in Jeremiah’s words the announcement of the New Covenant. Jeremiah’s description of laws written on hearts is understood to be Jesus’ call to moral consciousness. Jesus’ covenant requires that God be within us, because Jesus teaches that intention matters. No longer will only external action be judged against external laws carved in stone, but obedience to God will include the workings of the heart.
The letter called Hebrews provides a different perspective. In this passage Jesus is compared to the High Priest. This image of Jesus is not one of my favorites, because it generally serves only to evoke stained glass windows in which Jesus is dressed like an Anglican High Churchman. This is fairly ridiculous, as such clothing wasn’t invented for centuries after Jesus. Yet in the best sense of the word, a priest is human, and struggling, but also called on to receive, bear, and lift the needs common to us all to God. Is this not a good description of Jesus? Furthermore, the role of High Priest in Jewish temple worship was very specific. Each year, on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest goes, completely alone, into the holiest space on earth, to beg God’s forgiveness for the sins of all the people. The High Priest makes right again the relationship between God and God’s people. Is this not a good description of Jesus?
And so we come back to the Gospel of John, holding Jeremiah’s vision of a new covenant and the idea from Hebrews that Jesus might be our high priest. Neither of these ideas are obviously present in the Gospel text, yet both are part of what Jesus says today to his disciples. Approached by some anonymous Greeks accompanied by Phillip and Andrew, Jesus offers a succinct, one sentence parable: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Thus Jesus once again tells us that his death is not only unavoidable, but also necessary. For the two thousand years since then we have been talking about why that was.
As we approach Holy Week this question comes once again to the forefront of our religious practice. Why did Jesus have to die? What does it mean that God was crucified? Was Jesus’ death the sign of the new covenant that Jeremiah had prophesied so long before? Was that death somehow the offering of a new high priest? Or was it as Jesus said in John’s Gospel, “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” In John’s Gospel Jesus claims nothing less that to be remaking the world, and not in the sense of a far distant heaven. This very world must be different, Jesus says, and the start of that is not the destruction and violence that we human beings are so fond of, but the creative destruction and transformation of a grain of wheat. And here is one powerful way to begin to understand the mysteries of Holy Week: that the life of Jesus is the seed planted to grow a new world. AMEN.
The Friday Letters
27 March 2009
Charles Henry Brent, Missionary Bishop
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
We’re winding down to the end of our Lenten fast and gearing up for the epic events of Holy Week. This past Wednesday we held our final evening of discussion hosted by Lucas Mix. The conversation about science and religion was challenging and often enlightening. Thank you to all who participated in Evening Prayer, dinner, and the class itself. Stations of the Cross continues for two more Friday evenings: tonight at 7pm and next week, April 3rd, at 7pm. This service has evolved just a little bit each week and you are invited to come for the first time or to come again and experience this visual walk through the final events of Jesus’ earthly life.
I am preoccupied with Holy Week and probably will be until after Easter. There is much to consider, many services to plan, and six sermons over the next two weeks. I invite you all to find the schedule of Holy Week services in The eClarion and plan to attend as many as you can. The jump from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday is a bit of a jolt without anything in between; engage in the story as fully as possible and the story will respond with a deeper movement in your life.
Despite this busyness Jieun and I are taking this afternoon off to volunteer at the Emergency Food Network’s Repack Project. This program has been mentioned several times in past issues of The eClarion and I hope you’ll be hearing more about it in the future. After today I’ll have some personal experience to relate as well. In addition to the many worship opportunities you have to put on your calendar, I invite you to add some of the volunteer opportunities as well. These are the ways the faith we form in church become the Kingdom of God in the world. The chance to serve is a precious gift both to those who are served and to the servant.
I leave you with these invitations, and with a prayer that these next few weeks be a blessing in your lives and inspire you to renewed faith and practice.
Peace,
Ben.
A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on the fourth Sunday of Lent.
Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” John 3:16. That’s right, even though we Episcopalians are famously bad at proof-texting, I can cite chapter and verse for this line of John’s Gospel. Why? Because I watch football on television. Those of you who also watch football on television will know what I’m talking about. For the rest of you, let me tell you that nearly every football game played on television features someone who has bought a ticket at the end of the field, behind the goal posts, so that when the television camera shows the ball going through the uprights they can hold up a hand painted sign that says simply: John 3:16.
I think this is intended to be evangelism. Evangelism is another thing Episcopalians are famously bad at, so maybe I’m reading this wrong, but I think the sign painter’s goal is for unbelievers to watch football, see the sign, look up the verse in the dusty, long-ignored Bible on their shelf, and then be converted by the single line of text. I don’t know how often this plan yields results in the form of converts, but it does seem like it provides an excellent excuse for the evangelically-minded football fan to explain the expense of season tickets to his evangelically-minded but not sports-fan-minded wife. Maybe those were the intended results all along.
Personally, I think I would have gone with verse 14 if I was going to make a football-end-zone sign for the converting of the unbelievers. Imagine if an unbelieving couch potato was watching the big game on Sunday instead of going to church, and he sees me behind the end zone holding up a sign that says: John 3:14. “3:14?” he thinks, “I thought it was 3:16.” So he gets his dusty, long-ignored Bible off the shelf and looks up John 3:14. After some confusion about the table of contents and the archaic numbering system he finds this: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” This is completely confusing, of course, but it features a reptile. If you’ve ever watched the commercials during a televised football game you will already know that confusing-with-reptiles is a winning advertising strategy.
John 3:14 refers to a passage in the Book of Numbers. It is an odd passage, so of course I love it. If it weren’t for John 3:14, we would never read Numbers 21:4-9 in church. This story of the Israelites in the desert is another story where the Israelites have started grumbling. We call these stories “Murmuring” stories, because that’s how the King James English translated the Hebrew: the Israelites are murmuring against Moses and God. This story happens to be the final murmuring story, and for good reason. The Israelites murmur against Moses (which they’ve gotten away with before) and against God (which they are not going to get away with this time). Like frustrated two year olds they complain that they have no food and that the food tastes terrible.
In response to this, God sends poisonous snakes among the Israelites. The snakes bite them, and many die. The people repent of the sin of murmuring against God and Moses and ask to be relieved of this suffering. God tells Moses to make a bronze snake, put it upon a pole, and have those bitten look upon at, at which point they will be cured. Perhaps now you are beginning to understand why we’d never read this story if it weren’t mentioned in John’s Gospel?
There are so many things wrong with this story. We are accustomed to the cycle of sin, punishment, repentance, and forgiveness. Yet the sin (murmuring) seems so minor compared to the punishment (death by poisonous serpent). And God’s solution to the problem is incomprehensible. Make a snake of bronze and raise it up on a pole? Is this not the God that insisted last week the there should be no idols? Why is a golden snake better than a golden calf? Yet it works, which is almost worse, because how is a healing statue not magic? We can even find Biblical evidence that this was a bad idea on God’s part, for in 2 Kings 18:4 this same snake is present, five hundred years later, at which point it has a name (Nehushtan) and worshipers, so King Hezekiah has to destroy it.
How shall we redeem this story for ourselves? What meaning can we find, either in the original setting or for ourselves? I suggest that we go back to the Gospel of John, since he’s the one who got us into this mess in the first place. John’s reference of the Numbers story in verse 3:14 (Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up) is clarified by his reasoning in verse 15 (that whoever believes in him may have eternal life). In this passage from the Gospel Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus, who is probably still a little confused by the “Born again from water and the Holy Spirit” conversation that comes just before our text. Yet Nicodemus is a smart guy and quoting scripture is how these people have dialogues. What Jesus wants him to understand by referencing the story in Numbers is this comparison: Moses lifted up a snake on a pole so that anyone who looked at it would live. Jesus will be lifted up on a cross so that anyone who believes in him will have eternal life. You can look and live, or believe and live eternally.
This is the understanding I think we are meant to find: the snake didn’t heal, but when people looked upon it God would heal them. The snake is sacrament, not idol. The difference between these two is subtle, and exists mostly within the soul of the worshipper. Likewise, when Jesus is crucified, it is not the dead body on the cross that gives eternal life, but when people believe in why that body is there, then God will give them eternal life. The body is sacrament, not idol. For Nicodemus the crucifixion was confusing so he needed to start from something he knew. For us it’s the snake-on-a-pole that’s confusing, so we start from the crucifixion which we know.
Now that we’ve figured out why the Numbers story goes together with our Gospel passage, let us return to the football fan and his hand-painted sign. It is my contention that John 3:16, this one verse of scripture, is a golden snake on a pole. It is beautiful, it is given to us by God, and it is up to us whether it is idol or sacrament.
Perhaps it will seem odd to you that a verse of scripture might be an idol. It is scripture, after all. Perhaps it seemed even odder to you that two paragraphs ago I suggested that Jesus’ body on the cross might be an idol. It is Jesus, after all. I’m going to stand by this reasoning, at least for a little while longer. We Christians are not accustomed to thinking this way. It is much easier to put all things Christian, especially those things obviously and centrally Christian like the Bible and Jesus, under the heading of ‘not idols’. How could Jesus be an idol? Yet the lesson of Numbers, as I understand it, is that idol-ness (if you will) is not a necessary quality of a the thing being idolized, but rather something misguided worshippers bestow upon it. God did not intend that bronze snake to be an idol. God intended it to be a sacrament. It took human beings to name it, and worship it, and make it an idol that had to be destroyed.
How then can John 3:16 become an idol? By lifting it up on a pole at football games. By believing in the power of those three numerals and a punctuation mark. By thinking that this one verse contains so much power that the imposition of it into people’s lives is enough to precipitate a religious crisis after which those people will be either ‘saved’ or condemned.
Make no mistake about it, there is a crisis in John 3:16, though the guy holding it up in the end zone doesn’t think it’s the same crisis that I do. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Those are the key phrases, loved the world and everyone who believes. Which one is it? Who does God love? The world, or just those who believe? End zone guy thinks it’s the second, just those who believe. The more liberal you are religiously the more you’ll want to answer the first, all the world. I want it to be both, but only if we can all agree on what believe means.
In Greek, believe is a verb and faith is a noun. The Gospel of John uses the verb believe more than any other text in the New Testament. It uses the noun faith never. For John, believing is an action. If believing is a only a cognitive choice—a checkbox in your mind—then John 3:16 is an idol. If believing has consequences—if it is an active state that must be practiced—then John 3:16, and all that it implies, is a sacrament. Believe in Jesus, believe in God, and show me what that means in your life, and you shall have eternal life. AMEN.
The Friday Letters
20 March 2009
Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
It has been a good week for me, starting with a pre-St. Patrick’s party on Sunday evening to which Jieun and I invited everyone I know who doesn’t go the CECoP. Both of them came, so it was great. I spent my Monday Sabbath touring a coffee roastery and practicing alchemy in my kitchen.
Most of my office time this week has been devoted to scripture study. There are seven sermons between here and Easter morning, so I’m taking the unprecedented step (for me anyway) of looking further ahead than the coming Sunday. Such extended time spent reading not only scripture but learned essays about scripture always puts me in a funny frame of mind. I find myself wanting to get my cassock out of the closet and wear it around town—wanting to put away all the electronics in my life in favor of more mundane tools and entertainments—wanting to avoid the car and walk everywhere with my head bowed slightly—wanting to join some sort of modern day monastery that allows wives and the occasional session of video gaming. We’ll see whether all this study and the resultant mood is a net gain or loss for sermonizing.
I continue to enjoy our Wednesday Lenten program. I like the daily office of morning and evening prayer contained in our prayerbook, but I don’t like saying them alone. Thanks to all who have been coming at 6pm to share that service with me. The dinners have been flavorful both in taste and in conversation. I’ve particularly enjoyed the way our presenter, Lucas Mix, has been reframing the conversation between science and religion. Even those of us who don’t want it to be an argument of science vs. religion have a hard time imagining how else it might be. Lucas’ focus on the sources of knowledge and on the philosophical assumptions underlying both science and religion has been difficult to wrap my mind around while also being liberating.
Tonight is our third time to run through the Stations of the Cross service. This quiet meditation has been growing in strength over these past two weeks so I invite you again to attend if you are able.
Finally I want to make sure you are all aware that the Memorial Celebration for Charlotte Orazem is scheduled for Saturday, April 4th at 3:30pm. All of us who knew and loved Charlotte are invited to gather and celebrate that love and her life.
Happy weekend to you, and I hope to see you in church Sunday!
Peace,
Ben.
A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22
Walter Brueggemann is a Christian scholar of the Old Testament. He’s just about the only one I trust. If you really want to know what’s going on in the Old Testament, ask a Rabbi. Preferably several, since they will all have their own opinion. If, however, there are no Rabbis handy, Brueggemann will do. I like Brueggemann for two reasons. First, he has a nearly impossible to spell last name with a completely irrational number of letters in it. Second, he seems to be possessed by the idea that God is entirely wild and that everything we think we know about God (including the things Brueggemann himself thinks he knows about God) are probably wrong.
Today’s reading from Exodus is the famous Ten Commandments. Brueggeman has this to say: “These commands might be taken not as a series of rules, but as a proclamation in God’s own mouth of who God is and how God shall be ‘practiced’ by this community of liberated slaves.” Your first reaction will likely be as mine was: “Huh?” Surely, of all the parts of the Bible, we can definitively say that the Ten Commandments are a set of rules. You can argue about how to follow this one or that one but how can you argue that they aren’t even rules first and foremost?
I think Brueggemann is right though, and not just because I’m predisposed to like what he has to say. No, I double checked him with a Rabbi. Jonathan Sacks, who’s book I just finished reading, suggests that the Bible is not a record of humanity’s faith in God, but rather a record of God’s faith in humanity. Just the kind of backward, counterintuitive, and generally unreasonable thing that usually turns out to be true of God. Speaking of the Bible in general or the Ten Commandments in particular, when God tells us what to do, God is telling us more about who God is than who we are.
What do we do with this insight? Shall we disregard the way of living suggested by these ten teachings? By no means, I say! And yet, we ought to realize that there is more to understand here than a simple set of regulations. When someone comes indoors and says to you, “It’s cold as Hell out there,” you understand them to have given you their opinion on the temperature of the air outside, specifically its unsatisfactory lowness. Yet they have told you more than that: they have told what they think Hell is like. They’ve never been to Hell, and neither have you, and neither has anyone else, so comparing something to Hell serves both to emphasize the extremity of something (coldness or hotness) as well as to describe a terrible place we’ve never been nor hope to be.
Likewise, a God that commands us to not covet your neighbor’s house, your neighbor’s wife, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor is giving us not just a rule by which to construct a decent society, but also a clue as to what kind of God we’re going to need in order to make that society work. What kind of God refuses to compete with idols, be they golden calves or fat bank accounts? What kind of God ordains the weekend as holy, and to be set aside? What kind of God are we dealing with here? Furthermore, how far off have we gotten from the path that God sets before us? Aha! Now we’re talking about Lent.
And speaking of Lent, and flagellation, here comes Jesus with a whip made of cords. The Tantrum in the Temple, as I like to call it. The thing about the money changers and the sacrificial animal sellers is that they were necessary. You cannot pay the temple tax with Roman coinage, so someone has to convert your pocket change to Jewish coins. And according to the Law sacrificial animals have to be ‘without blemish’, but how are you going to walk miles and miles to get to the temple without your animal getting blemished? You need money changers, and you need sacrificial animal sellers. They are there in service to the Temple. Just like the fund raising technique sellers, the church growth specialists, and all the other religious consultants, are there in service to the church. Until Jesus comes along an tosses them all out.
Why? If they’re just there to help? Why throw a fit and evict them?
“Because,” says Jesus, “I’m not sure you remember why you’re here.” Human nature being what it is, given enough time we will forget to worship God and instead worship the system we’ve created for worshiping God. We human beings love our institutions, even when we’re hating them. We love to organize things, and make systems, and maintain complicated machines for getting things done. It is one of our great strengths. It is one of our great weaknesses. “Why are you here?” asks Jesus, “A sense of duty? A need for beauty? The love of a traditional liturgy? Or are you here to worship a God who says,
‘I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’”
These are the words of God spoken through the prophet Amos. Amos makes his case strongly; he wants to get your attention and make a point. I think Jesus was doing the same thing in the Temple courtyard. I don’t think Amos or Jesus were being calculating about it; they just saw hypocrisy and went after it with a vengeance.
Just to be clear, I don’t think God hates our liturgy. I think God does take delight in our solemn assemblies and listens to the music we make. However, I am convinced that God is on record as saying that these things are utterly worthless if they are not backed up by a solid love of justice and practicing of righteousness.
There are courthouses in this country where the Ten Commandments are carved in stone. We argue about this—about the separation of church and state, and about the appropriateness of having religious texts that we don’t all share printed in a place we are all meant to be equal. Folks who want to make it clear that they like these carvings right where they are sometimes place signs in their front yards with the Ten Commandments printed on them. I have a feeling this would make Jesus angry. I have a feeling that if he walked by a house like that he would yank the sign out of the lawn, and turn it around, and stick it back in the ground, so that the sign faced the front window of the house instead of the sidewalk.
I am not trying to make a case for the Ten Commandments in public spaces, either pro or con. Honestly, this is not an issue I care deeply about. What I do care deeply about is the God who lies behind those commandments, and how well we are seeking after him. If Brueggemann is right, if these commandments are to “be taken not as a series of rules, but as a proclamation in God’s own mouth of who God is and how God shall be ‘practiced’”, then let us worship not the commandments, but the God who bestows them upon us. By all means, let us have no other Gods. Let us set up no idols. Let us not use God’s name wrongly. Let us keep our Sabbath day holy. Let us honor our fathers and mothers. Let us not murder, or commit adultery, or steal, or lie. Let us not covet. Let us follow these commandments, but above and beyond the following of the commandments, let us follow the God who is proclaimed by them. Let us follow, and love. AMEN.
The Friday Letters
13 March 2009
My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
As some of you know already, I am an early adopter and big fan of the Amazon Kindle, the (still relatively) new electronic reading device. You’ve likely seen me carry it to the pulpit on Sundays instead of the more traditional stack of papers or 3×5 cards. And even though Amazon came out with a new, improved version of the Kindle while mine is still only a few months old (sigh), I’m still a fan. This morning, however, I discovered a huge flaw. Like a poor college student trying to get home with a gas tank full of fumes only, I ignored the battery level indicator just a little bit too long. Just a few pages from the end of a great book it shut down and I had to hustle to the office to get my plug-in thingy and finish reading.
You Luddites among my readers will enjoy this comic. [Warning: while I thoroughly enjoy Penny Arcade and this particular comic is rated PG, generally the comics on this website are rated R or above.]
How to Heal a Fractured World was not at all diminished by my need to finish it with the power cord trailing from it. I mentioned this book several letters ago. I’m not sure what to say about it that will interest you. The few times people have asked me what I’m reading (after they ask me about the Kindle that is), and I’ve said it was a book about ethics from a Jewish perspective, their eyes have glazed over so fast that I ended up helping them look for their contacts on the floor. Perhaps I can say something about myself that I think is a direct result of having read this book. For the past few days, I find myself wondering how I can bless someone that day. Not in the priestly “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” sense, but in the making someone else’s life better sense. It seems to me that any book that drives me out of myself and towards caring about others is worth reading.
This past week has been full and good. Your Vestry met Tuesday evening and continued to have really exciting conversation, particularly about children’s education. You’ll be hearing more about this, hopefully soon. Wednesday evening’s program on Science and Religion was again very worthwhile even though many of us are out of shape for such deep thinking. Good mental exercise if nothing else. Tonight we have the Station of the Cross service at 7pm, after which we are hosting the Diocesan Commission for Emerging Mission.
I hope to see you all on Sunday for the third week of our Lenten journey. And even if you don’t have the time to read through a tome on Jewish Ethics, I hope you’ll ask yourself today, how can my life be a blessing to the life of someone else today?
Peace,
Ben.
A Sermon by Benjamin J. Newland
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him. It must always be startling to have the Lord appear to you, yet by now Abram has more experience with such theophanies than any other human being ever. Abram was seventy-five years old when the Lord first made this particular promise to him, that he and Sarai should have a son together, and that from that son would come a nation of people that God would work together with to change the world. The Lord appeared to Abram again several years later to refresh this promise, when Ishmael had been born and Sarai at least was starting to doubt God’s promise. Now here we are, twenty-four years after God promised a son to Abram and Sarai, and how they must doubt God by now, for if you were going to cause a seventy-five year old man to have a child surely the best plan would not be to wait a further quarter of a century to get started.
I have three interesting things to tell you about this story. I’m going to tell you two of them right now, then save the third for later. First, you no doubt noticed that this is the story in which Abram becomes Abraham, and Sarai becomes Sarah. This changing of names isn’t common in the Hebrew Scriptures, but it happens occasionally and when it does is signals a radical change in the nature of that person’s relationship with God. The other easily rememberable occasion where this happens is when Jacob wrestles with God all night on the banks of the Jordan River. Come dawn he is finally defeated, and God gives him the new name of Israel. Jacob, now Israel, has wrestled with God personally, and is now named explicitly as the renewed people of God—the people God was just setting out to create when he renamed Abram and Sarai.
Abram and Sarai, now Abraham and Sarah, are renamed at a similar juncture in their relationships with God. Isaac, the long awaited son, is soon to arrive, and God forges anew the covenant he has made with Isaac’s parents. So here’s that first really interesting thing: Abraham and Sarah aren’t the only ones getting new names in this story. God opens this dialogue with Abraham by saying, “I am God Almighty…” God has several names throughout the Old Testament, one of which is El Shaddai, a name you probably know because of that schmaltzy folk tune from 1960’s summer camps. The Hebrew El Shaddai is translated into English text as “God Almighty”. Long before the invention of schmaltzy folk tunes, God bore this name, but not before this story takes place. God arrives in this passage of Scripture and for the first time in scripture refers to Godself with this name. The covenant God makes with Abraham and Sarah is so significant that not just those two need new names—God too will bear this new name in God’s new relationship with this couple and their descendants.
Here’s the second interesting thing about this story: I have been trying over the past almost two years to train you to be suspicious of our lectionary whenever it leaves verses out. Did you notice which verses we read this morning? This story of Abram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah comes in the seventeenth chapter of Genesis and covers the first sixteen verses of that chapter. We read verses one through seven, and fifteen and sixteen. So, I want you to wonder, what happened in verses eight through fourteen? You have Bibles in front of you in the pews, so feel free to check up on those things. Today I’ll give you the answer: in verses eight through fourteen God invents circumcision.
I guess circumcision is too delicate a topic for public worship on a Sunday morning. If so, I hereby commit faux pas and mention it anyways. It seems fairly important. There is no rationale or explanation for circumcision in the Scriptures. God does not say why this particular act of body modification should be required of God’s Hebrew sons. God simply makes this a requirement of the covenant with Abraham. This is not a covenant where God does all the work and Abraham merely goes along with it, passively waiting the long years between visits from God. From now on, a covenant with God will contain responsibilities and promises on both sides. From now on, Abraham and his children will be physically involved in God’s covenant.
Let us fast forward now, past two readings and several hundred years, to the Gospel text where Jesus is laying the groundwork for his New Covenant. This passage from the Gospel of Mark is quintessentially Lenten. It is also missing its opening scene, yet that scene is quite famous so maybe we all know it already. Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is, and they provide the usual spate of answers before Peter wins the round of Eschatological Jeopardy by saying, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus is quite proud of Peter for a moment, until he starts talking about suffering. That’s where we came in this morning, at verse thirty-one, where Jesus begins saying quite openly that, yes, he is the Messiah, but he’s not the Messiah they think he is, and there is going to be suffering and death, and also a resurrection.
Peter reclaims his position as chief idiot amongst the Apostles, taking Jesus aside and telling him he needs a serious P.R. overhaul to this new message. Messiahs don’t suffer and die. They conquer and evict the occupying empire.
In dramatic fashion, Jesus lets Peter and the rest of the disciples know how wrong that is, and that if they think he’s come to lead a revolution they’ve got another thing coming. Then he delivers the message of Lent.
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
This is how the New Covenant is going to work, says Jesus. It is going to be the opposite of everything you’ve ever heard before. It will not be about winning; it will be about losing. It will not be about profit; it will be about loss. It will not be about living; it will be about dying. And just like God who requires Abraham to sacrifice a portion of his body to bind him into this covenant so Jesus requires his followers to pick up and carry with them an instrument of torture and death to bind them into this new covenant that he will forge through Holy Week and Easter.
So here’s that last interesting thing I wanted to tell you about the Genesis passage. It’s not a tricky translation issue or an intellectual wedge into the text itself. It’s just an idea I had. Maybe I’m making this up; you decide. Here it is: when God speaks to Abraham, God says, “I am God Almighty; walk before me…” God doesn’t say, I will take care of you, I will show you where to go, I will put your feet on the path I choose. Instead, God says, walk in front of me, take your own steps, you lead this dance.
Again, it’s possible I’m making something out of nothing, but that command to “walk before me” has haunted me all week. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the popular devotional poem called “Footprints”. It’s a poem about walking with Jesus, and if you don’t know it already someone can fill you in after the service. It’s a beautiful sentiment, and I’m not knocking it at all, but the point of the poem is that Jesus is walking so closely beside you that in times of trouble he could carry you along without you noticing. It’s comforting, and not at all out of line with some passages of Scripture. But it’s the square opposite of what God asks of Abraham today. “Walk before me.” Take your own steps, forge your own path, make your own way. I am bound to you in covenant, but I am not your puppet master, and you must walk your own path.
Jesus doesn’t say that his followers are going to have to carry their crosses alone, but its implied in the talk of suffering and death. In some ways, Jesus will always be with those who follow him, but in other ways he will not, and crosses will have to be born anyways.
Like most of Lent, this message is a little bit scary and a little bit encouraging. It is a little bit scary to know that God might ask us to go before, to walk in front, to lead where it might feel better to follow. Yet it is also a little bit encouraging to know that we are such partners with God that we might be able to go in front sometimes—that even though we are God’s children we might from time to time be able to teach our parent something. AMEN.
