The Second Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 8 – Year A
St. James’ Episcopal Church, Pullman WA
The Rev. Mary Beth Rivetti, Rector
Genesis 22:1-14; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42
How did we get here? It was Pentecost not so long ago, and we were wearing red and hearing the wind of the spirit rush through this place, and now today we get these three strange readings. “How long,” says the psalmist, “shall I have perplexity in my mind?”
Because our Easter fell almost as late as possible this year, we’ve been dropped down almost as if into an ongoing conversation in the readings for the fixed Sundays in Ordinary Time. Those “green” Sundays when we use the ordinal numbers to count the season – the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, the 3rd, the 4th, until we get back into our liturgical calendar with the last Sunday and we start again on the big story of the coming, and birth, and baptism, and life and death and resurrection of Jesus.
But coming in so late, we miss some context. For instance, in Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus says today “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me,” this isn’t just some mystical incantantion we might recognize if it were in John’s Gospel. It is the wrap-up to a long discourse where Jesus has laid out for his disciples exactly what they are to expect now that he is sending them out. I’m sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves, he says. So be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Don’t worry, he says, when the beatings start. Your Father in heaven will not forget you. It is going to be dangerous work to be a follower of Jesus. It is going to be dangerous for all those who step into the shoes of those disciples, who are baptized into the community of the followers of Christ.
Or if we read today in Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome that they are to preserve their bodies for works of righteousness, Preserve every piece of your body – your feet, your arms, your legs, your heads, your minds, your arms, your sexual desire – all of it in the service of God, for the wages of sin is death – well, how do we read that without thinking we’ve stepped into some judgmental system that denies the wholesomeness of our embodied living? Unless we’ve been reading along throughout that letter to see that Paul keeps going over and over the same theme of dying constantly to a way of life that is centered solely in ourselves, and rising constantly again into the baptized community of faith, where the dignity of every human being, including our own selves, reflects our devotion to God in Christ, our ability to see Christ in the face of one another.
But particularly it would have been helpful to start with the beginning of the story of Abraham and Sarah. We might have started back with the story of Noah, or maybe the call of Abraham to leave his home and go to a land that God would show him, or the promise of Abraham that he and Sarah would have a son – and their wondrous visitation by the Oaks of Mamre, and Sarah’s giving birth to Isaac when Abraham was 100 years old. We’d have some context, at least, for this horrible, terrifying story we heard today in our first reading, the story of Abraham’s obedience to God, the story of Abraham offering Isaac to God.
It is a story that resonates in art and literature. Wilfred Owen horrifyingly has Abraham ignore the Angel of the Lord and plunge the dagger into the heart of the youth, as all of Europe did in the war that would claim Owen’s life. In my youth, Bob Dylan sang, “God said to Abraham, kill me a son.” And Leonard Cohen sang the Song of Isaac, “I was 8 years old, and he came into my room….” The early Christian writers would see in this story a prefiguring of the passion of Jesus, the beloved son, become the lamb of sacrifice. We don’t hear how old Isaac is in this story. All the other details are so clear. Is he a boy? Is he, as later Jewish tradition suggested, a young man? Judaism and Christianity, growing up together in the same crucible of a land tormented by oppressors who easily hung on a cross those they saw as threats to stability, could see in the young man carrying the wood on his shoulders the martyr, the Christ, walking to crucifixion carrying on his back his own crossbeam.
In Jewish tradition, this scene is called the Binding of Isaac, in Hebrew, Akedah, whose story forms part of daily prayer. The rich rabbinical tradition that was coming into its own around the time of Jesus’ own ministry, developed a tradition where Isaac was actually sacrificed, where he became a willing offering, a martyr guiding his father’s hand to his throat, helping him make the fatal cut that would spill his own blood, like the paschal lamb, protecting and saving the people, and bringing blessing upon the land.
The story itself is painstakingly constructed. The words that God speaks to Abraham, Lech lecha, Get up and go are the same words he spoke when he told Abraham so long ago to leave everything, his homeland, his family, his gods, and follow him to a place I will show you, the words he uses to guide Abraham to Moriah. The poignance of that command is emphasized in the Hebrew word order: “take your son, your favored one, the one whom you love, Isaac.” As the two of them walk apart from the animals and the servants, the sentence “and the two of them walked on together” frames Isaac’s innocent question “Father, … where is the sheep for the offering?” and Abraham’s reply, “God will provide” – or literally – God will see to the sheep.
Some interpreters see this as a story that condemns child sacrifice – a practice that was still current in the neighboring kingdoms to the people who told this story. The book of Chronicles connects this story with the name of the Temple Mount, Moriah, and the redeeming of the first born son with an animal for sacrifice. But the story is one that challenges us in the call to obedience. Why does Abraham not waver in his response? Why not bargain, as he did so insistently on behalf of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah. And the text seems to say, when offering a gift to God, the gift is always innocent and pure and blameless – of course the beloved child is the right gift to offer. There can be no swapping out of, say, some other servant’s child.
Who can worship a God who would ask such an offering? A God who asks nothing less than our dearest and our truest and most precious? Wow – what a stewardship sermon that would make!
We live in a world that regularly demands the sacrifice of our treasure and our children into the fires of Molech. Where we watch Syrians fighting a regime that not too many years ago had no qualms about gunning down 10,000 protesters in one day. Where we sigh in relief as one of the thousands of prisoners held without trial in China is released to house arrest – a house arrest that for many prisoners of conscience can be like being entombed alive. We live in a world that is mirrored in the young adult series, The Hunger Games, which begins in an allegorical world where communities must draw lotteries every year for the young girl and boy from each sector who must be sacrificed to appease the overlords. The lottery system is rigged by poverty and starvation. Those who need public assistance to make ends meet have their names entered more than once in the drawing; and the divergence is systemic– requiring public assistance just one time ensures that the doubling of the chances of death are redoubled each year until only the most poverty stricken are likely to be sent to die to keep the death from visiting those they love. Like the families who couldn’t afford to pay for draft deferments from Vietnam. Like the families who send their children to the army reserves so they can afford to go to college and perhaps have a better life if only they aren’t sent over and over and over again to fight a war no one seems to recall why we are there.
No spoiler alert here for the trilogy – but the system is shattered by the power of love. Just as the system is shattered for us by the power of our devotion to the one who gave us life. In his blind devotion to the God who says, “get up, go” Abraham becomes the one through whom blessing flows to the whole of humanity. Through his obedience even unto death, Jesus is the one perfect offering who releases all of humankind from the power of death. Through our baptism into Christ’s death we are also raised up into newness of life. A life that is never free from confrontation against the principalities and powers of this present age, but a life in which we as the members of the body of Christ, through time and space, filling all in all, overcome the machinery of death, held always in the love of God. And it is to these ones who hunger and thirst after righteousness that we hold out that cup of water in the name of the one who loved us first.
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